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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23623513">There Will Be Love (Not Half as Much Privilege)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turandokht/pseuds/Turandokht'>Turandokht</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Dominion of the Sword -- A Bellamione Tale [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>...but this still isn’t a cakewalk., Adult Hermione Granger, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - 21st Century, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Amputation, Armenian mythology, BAMF Bellatrix Black Lestrange, BAMF Hermione Granger, BAMF Narcissa Black Malfoy, Bechdel Test Pass, Bellatrix Black Lestrange Lives, Black Family Drama (Harry Potter), Black Family-centric (Harry Potter), Canon Divergence - Battle of Hogwarts, Cynical, Cynical Hermione Granger, Dark, Dark Magic Rituals (Harry Potter), Dark Ron Weasley, Developing Relationship, Discord: Bellamione Coven, Discord: Bellamione Cult, Dubious Morality, Enemies to Lovers, Epic, Epic Battles, Epic Love, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Evil Voldemort (Harry Potter), Execution, F/F, Femslash, Genocide, Good Slytherins, Guerrilla Warfare, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, In-Universe RPF, Koldovstoretz (Harry Potter), Koschei the Deathless - Freeform, Lesbian Hermione Granger, Lesbians, Magic, Magical Artifacts, Mild Horror Elements., Military Ranks, Military Uniforms, Minor Bellatrix Black Lestrange/Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Mostly bad ones., Murder, Mythology - Freeform, Mythology References, Naval Battles, No Lesbians Die, Nuclear Warfare, Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Winter, POV Bellatrix Black Lestrange, POV Hermione Granger, POV Narcissa Black Malfoy, POV Third Person, Past Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Persian Empire, Persian Mythology - Freeform, Plot With Smut, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Resurrection, Russia, Russian Literature, Russian Mythology, Same-Sex Marriage, Sane Bellatrix Black Lestrange, Second War with Voldemort, Serious, Slow Burn, Slytherin Politics, Slytherins Being Slytherins, Smoking, Some named characters die., Tea, The God of Dementors., The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, Trains, Triggers, Violence, Voldemort is as bad as Hitler... Or maybe Emperor Palpatine, War, War Crimes, Women Being Awesome, Women In Power, Women in the Military, Wordcount: Over 200.000, british mythology - Freeform, epic magic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:46:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>97</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>438,094</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23623513</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turandokht/pseuds/Turandokht</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>This story is basically War and Peace set in the Harry Potter universe, with lesbians.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bellatrix Black Lestrange &amp; Narcissa Black Malfoy &amp; Andromeda Black Tonks, Draco - Relationship - Relationship, Hermione Granger &amp; Andromeda Black Tonks, Hermione Granger &amp; Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger &amp; Ginny Weasley &amp; Original Female Character(s), Hermione Granger &amp; Luna Lovegood &amp; Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger &amp; Nymphadora Tonks, Hermione Granger/Bellatrix Black Lestrange</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Dominion of the Sword -- A Bellamione Tale [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1840054</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>823</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>505</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Bellamione, Crossgenerational Slash, Focus on Female Characters</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Caspian Sea.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For those who may have visited this story and given up on it in the past few months, I discovered and fixed the error where Chapter 1 was being overwritten by the prologue. This was an AO3 database issue, and it was fixed by combining Chapters 1 and 2 into a single chapter with a cold open. </p><p>Almost five years after the Battle of Hogwarts ended in Harry Potter's death and the triumph of Lord Voldemort, Hermione Granger and her surviving friends battle to keep hope alive in a post-apocalyptic world where Muggles now know about magic. Fighting alongside the wizards of Koldovstoretz and Muggle forces in a never-ending genocidal war, Hermione will find herself confronted with a choice that may restore the hope of victory to the free world, and present her with an impossible love.</p><p>And somehow, Narcissa Black Malfoy has to save her sister from the gallows. </p><p>There will be no easy choices in a world under the grip of Voldemort’s power, but love blossoms even in the strangest of times and places, while old powers and legends may be the only hope anyone has for victory against the sinister power of the Morsmordre.</p><p>Bellatrix Black Lestrange's character here was greatly inspired by her in Kuraibites' amazing "Those Gilded Chains we Wear" -- except I took everything in a different direction.</p><p>So, some of my readers asked me to annotate each chapter because I use some culturally unfamiliar terms and complicated terminology. Thus, I am going back through to annotate all the chapters with notes explaining things. </p><p>Non-consensual sex is only implied, never shown -- but there will be sex shown -- eventually. Oh yes, there definitely will be. This is ultimately the story of a relationship, but I take the fullness of time to develop it.</p><p>Bella and Hermione don't see each other after the Battle of Hogwarts until Chapter Eight -- this IS a slow burn story. Their coming together is a lot of work, here.</p><p>Russian language edition now being posted on ficbook:<br/>https://ficbook.net/readfic/9445775</p><p>Note that this story is published, edited to comply with the Mature tag rules, on fanfiction.net, as "Not Half as Much Privilege".</p><p>The ending is a good one, but how we get there and what happens in between and how grey we get—will be a ride!</p><p>Note also that if you ever click on a chapter right after I update, and the formatting is messed up, I am using OpenOffice to write this, and so I have to load them to the website, and then do some final formatting and then update. So refresh in about five minutes and the formatting should be fixed.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Due to an ongoing AO3 databasing issue, Chapter 1 is duplicated as Chapter 2. Please skip directly to Chapter 3 when you have finished reading Chapter 1--the story is complete and you aren't missing anything. My apologies about this, but as the mere author, there's nothing I can do. :-)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Caspian</strong>
</p><p><em>If some on the side of the enemy desert to come to your service, if they be loyal, they will always make you a great acquisition; for the forces of the adversary diminish more with the loss of those who flee, than with those who are killed, even though the name of the fugitives is suspect to the new friends, and odious to the old. – </em>Machiavelli, <em>The Art of War.</em></p><p>"Hermione, is this anything like a Muggle cruise? From before, I mean."</p><p>Hermione Granger slowly sat down the book, and ran a hand through her short hair. She understood what Ginny <em>really </em>meant by the offhanded comment, and looked up to her friend with her long hair braided sharply down her back and a bow near the top. "A little bit. There would be less smoke, though. The deck chairs would be nicer."</p><p>"Oh, well, they seem nice enough. The sea is very blue. There's this nice chicken and rice dish they sell down in the galley; I think it has mint in it," Ginny continued.</p><p>Hermione knew what was going to come next. She closed her eyes and started fumbling through the pockets of her field blouse for her pack of Belomors. "It probably is better than the field rations," she agreed mildly.</p><p>"Well, anyway… Don't you think there's enough smoke already?"</p><p>"It's the wrong kind," Hermione answered, reaching up to rub at one of her eyes and stare at the perfect blue reflection of the Caspian Sea, glinting in the white sun of the desert. "Ron sent another letter, didn't he?"</p><p>"He did," Ginny affirmed, and sighed, and made to sit down next to Hermione, which restored to the other witch a fading view of Turkmenbashi on the shore behind them. "You know that he's doing what has to be done against Voldemort. We <em>all </em>are. It's been so hard for him, since Harry died and we lost Hogwarts… We lost England…"</p><p>Hermione finished striking up the harsh Russian papirosa. She knew they would kill her someday, and she liked that thought very much. Until then, she'd have to fight. A part of her wanted to leave her friend be on the deck-chairs, as the heavy diesel exhaust wafted overhead from the straining, ancient, poorly maintained engines. <em>They probably use cartridge start, </em>Hermione thought to distract herself, musing that surely on Russians would ever come up with an idea so absurdly, well, <em>Russian, </em>as to start an engine with a gun cartridge. She could get up, and walk over to the fantail, where Alexandra and the other officers were already smoking. There was a key difference between her and Ginny, in the eyes of their comrades: Ginny was a Witch.</p><p>Hermione was also a witch—but she was an <em>officer. </em>Sergei Alexeivich, one of Major Alexandra Rostislavna Lukachenko's direct subordinates, tossed her a cheerful wave and a knowing grin to distract her, and it made Hermione crack a grin, too. She was tempted to go over and socialise with Alexandra and her officers—their battalion was dedicated to supporting Hermione's contingent of wizards—but it would make Ginny upset.</p><p>"You're not even going to read it, are you?" Ginny pleaded. Her braid fit with a lot of the Russian women in uniform, who tended to keep their hair long in a braid with a bow when they were not in combat—she had managed to fit in. A lot of the witches from Koldovstoretz did the same now.</p><p>"Maybe later. Enjoy the deck-chairs, Ginny."</p><p>"Hermione…"</p><p>"I'm going to get some chicken," her friend answered, and started toward the doors to belowdecks with the cigarette dangling from her lips. The excuse, at least, gave everyone an honourable way out, and Ginny sank into one of the chairs and tried to relax.</p><p>It was late 2002, almost five years after the Battle of Hogwarts, and nobody in the world cared about whether or not you smoked indoors anymore. No, there were plenty of other things that would kill you first. Like the cloud of smoke they were sailing towards, the massive billowing black clouds from the oil wells at Baku which were still burning, four years after six nuclear weapons hit the city.</p><p>From the multi-sided nuclear war that Voldemort had started to "cull the muggle herd" when he openly took power in Britain. From Hermione, Ron, Ginny and everyone she cared about <em>failing. </em></p><p>From Harry dying.</p><p>Hermione stuffed the pocket copy of Machiavelli's <em>Art of War</em> into her fatigues, and couldn't quite remember ever seeing a sea as beautiful as this one. But it brought no comfort to her heart. Pausing at the doors which protected the stairs going belowdecks, she took a last look, to the first ferry that was carrying Turkmen troops and travelling right ahead of them, to the Russian frigate <em>Tatarstan </em>standing off her starboard quarter.</p><p>High up in the tops of the frigate's radar masts, the two lonely wizards on air guard looked like any other soldiers with their massive greatcoats pulled close against the cold wind; fully exposed to the sea breeze, they were much cooler than Hermione and Ginny on the fantail. Ahead off the starboard bow, the smoke from Baku, even though it was hundreds of klicks away, could indeed be seen fouling the sky under the white desert sun. It complicated the job of those wizards, who would have only bare seconds to save the ships from a magical attack originating from Makhachkala, the southernmost position of Voldemort's forces on the Caspian sea, but it also served like a smoke-screen for the route between Turkmenbashi and Alat, the Caspian port of Azerbaijan to which they were bound.</p><p>Hermione sighed, shouldered her AKM, and went below. As promised, there was chicken and rice, and the chicken had some kind of mint yoghurt sauce. And there was a pleasant surprise, too, one of the few new friends she had made in this terrible new world of smoke, soot, snow, and smert (or, Russian for death, to give her four s's). Larissa Sergeivna Naryshkina was dancing a Cossack's lezginka to a tune provided by a balalaika and an accordion.</p><p>Hermione dashed out her cigarette in one of the old bakelite trays on the table and took a guilty moment to admire a new friend for less than platonic reasons. The aristocratic Larissa was from one of the purest of pure-blood Russian wizarding families, and filled out her uniform very well, with her dark hair pinned up under the papakha of the uniform of a Registered Cossack of the Orenburg Host, and shining blue eyes as rich as the Caspian's waves.</p><p>Finishing her song, she went for the samovar. "Tea, Hermione?" By now, Hermione's Russian was perfectly good. She was still good at studying, she wouldn't give that up for anything, wouldn't stop until she was dead. It was the last thing that was normal.</p><p>"Certainly."</p><p>Larissa was at her side a heartbeat later with two cups. It was all the same intense Russian zavarka, boiled to a syrup from tea bricks and then diluted with hot water, but Larissa put cherry preserves into her's, and Hermione took some condensed milk from the galley. The men with the musical instruments had switched to singing <em>Vashe Blagorodie, Gospoda Udacha </em>('Your Honour, Lady Luck'). The verse they were on went something like:</p><p>"<em>Your Honour, Lady Luck,</em></p><p>
  <em>To some you are kind, to some otherwise.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Wait, don't call for the 9 grams into the heart.</em>
</p><p><em>I'm unlucky in death, will be lucky in love.</em>"</p><p>The diesels made the table shake, but the low one-meter waves they were running head on into, the old Soviet steel hull handled well, even though it had been so streaked with rust when they boarded that Ginny had gotten a queasy look on her face.</p><p>"You're lost in a reverie again." Larissa was one of the kindest pure-bloods Hermione had ever known, not at all bigoted to her, and very perceptive, but she was very much ignoring the cossack officer who was now dancing to try and get her attention. Friends, yes, but she would likely <em>never </em>even <em>think </em>of a muggle-born that way, let alone a <em>muggle</em> in that way.</p><p>"My ex-boyfriend wrote me a letter again."</p><p>"Strelkov," Larissa muttered, using Ron's <em>nom de guerre </em>instead of his name, and turning her own attention to eye her gun against the wall. Wizards didn't need them, but they carried them so they couldn't immediately be identified <em>as </em>Wizards in a mass of soldiers.</p><p>"Yes." Hermione took a drink of her tea, still blazing hot as they drank it in Central Asia, though the condensed milk had taken the edge off. "He wants to get back together, but I … What he did to those collaborators in Chisinau, Larissa. I can't."</p><p>Larissa sipped her tea. "Most people consider his actions heroic. Even among the most courageous, there aren't many Wizards volunteering to fight behind Voldemort's lines. Isn't he in Poland now?"</p><p>"That's what they say, but nobody knows. Operational security, you know."</p><p>"Got to keep the constant tension up," Larissa murmured. It was true; the 'strategy of tension', muggles weren't terribly effective at fighting Voldemort by themselves, but even a few wizards with them could make an insurgency terribly effective, it forced a wizard to constantly be on his or her toes, they could never relax, never calm down, never let down their guards, or a single shot in the dark, or a cup of poison, or a dagger or a suicide bomb would be the end of them. The objective, quite simply, was to make the lives of Voldemort's Death Eaters in occupied Europe a living Hell, or, as it had been put at the time, 'since we can't put them back in Azkaban, we will bring Azkaban to them.'</p><p>"It's a licence for endless murder," Hermione answered.</p><p>"Wars happen, shit gets broken," Larissa shrugged. "But, I understand why you're uncomfortable. It changes a man. Five years of this, three billion dead…"</p><p>"Maybe I just don't want men anymore." Hermione wanted to get up, wanted to invite Larissa up-deck for a smoke, she wanted the gun to not be a weight on her shoulder. Instead, she forced herself to finish eating her chicken, because after the starving children that she had seen in Donetsk during their retreat from the Ukraine, she could never leave even a single grain of rice on her plate again without feeling a crushing blow of guilt.</p><p>Now Voldemort's armies were on the Volga, filled with slaves forced to fight for him. But he would not get past the Volga, and thousands were dying every day to keep it so. Muggle wars could last for <em>decades. </em>Now, Hermione felt, a wizard one would, too.</p><p>"Do you know what we're going to Azerbaijan for? They wouldn't even tell me and I'm a Senior Councillor of Magic," Larissa gestured to the three bronze stars on her epaulettes. Russians had ranks and uniforms for everything, and Larissa kept those rank tabs even semi-under-cover as a Registered Cossack.</p><p>"Five ranks down from the top," Hermione teased her, feeling better when she finished her food and reminding her friend that despite the grand title, it was actually a pretty common rank.</p><p>Larissa twisted a mock glare at her.</p><p>"So, yes, I do," Hermione allowed. "I can't tell you much, but…" Her voice dropped to a whisper.</p><p>"Voldemort has sent Bellatrix Lestrange to the Caucasus front with two divisions of the Janissary Corps. And we don't know why. But with that…"</p><p>Larissa's eager smile had frozen on her face. The Janissaries were Voldemort's best troops: They were <em>volunteers. </em>Bellatrix was the most powerful surviving Death Eater. "Bozhe moi," she whispered. "We're in for it now."</p><p>"Yeah," Hermione forced out. "Let's go have a smoke." Hermione Granger was only twenty-three years old, but she felt like she could be fifty.</p><p>Larissa smiled and got up with her. "Sure. I'm going to get a crude oil treatment when we get to Naftalan, I swear… You should too, the desert is hard on the skin. Six months in Gansu with our Chinese allies, I didn't think we'd ever get off that front…"</p><p>"Fuck my skin," Hermione mumbled, reaching again for her pack of Belomors. She remembered the kind soldiers who had given her a pack on the night that she had learned how many people had died in the nuclear war Voldemort started. She had wandered away from where the British wizard refugees were staying, crying, horrified at her failure. The cancer-sticks were a sort of self-flagellation that had brought her comfort on that night, and she'd never looked back.</p><p>As she reached for them, though, her sleeve pulled back a bit, and she saw part of the scar and tugged it down sharply again. "Fuck my skin." Cursing in Russian was about the only thing that made her feel good about <em>that. </em>"I don't want another boyfriend, so it doesn't matter. But I'm sure Ginny will go with you if you ask her." <em>This is the future? This! </em>She hung on the rail and smoked and looked out over the sea, and wished with all of her heart that Harry was still alive, that there was <em>something </em>to look forward to instead of endless war.</p>
<hr/><p>Bellatrix Lestrange sank deeper into the crude oil bath. She had been assured it would take years off her skin if she did it every day for ten minutes a day, the heavy Naftalan crude having been plundered from the tanks at the terminal in the city of Makhachkala when their troops took it. And if there was one thing that Bellatrix would try at this point in her life, it was anything to recover her youth.</p><p>Half the city had been wrecked in the fighting. Leading fanatical Dagestani irregulars who came out of the hills shouting 'Allahuackbar!' as they attacked, a small group of Koldovstoretsy, as the Russian wizards called themselves, had hit Yaxley's slave-soldiers in the flank when they had been advancing toward the Iron Gates of Derbent. Yaxley's Army and half the younger wizards under his command had been slain, and he had been recalled to London in disgrace, officially for his defeat. Of course, the twelve Koldovstoretsy involved in the operation and most of their Dagestani troops had been wiped out, but first they had stopped cold an advance by Voldemort's forces into the Caucasus for at least six months.</p><p>In fact, though, Bellatrix knew the real reason for the recall order for Yaxley was that Voldemort wanted to use his most reliable Death Eater (her) for a very special mission. It was a mission to the Caucasus, a mission of great personal importance to the Dark Lord and self-proclaimed Emperor of Earth. The kind of mission which had led to her being given two divisions of Janissaries, the only troops that they really had who could fight man for man on even terms with the motivated armies of the surviving Muggle nations, whose military equipment had been enchanted again and again by the wizards of Koldovstoretz, Wahemaya and Rìyuè until pretty much all of it that still survived had some kind of magical protection.</p><p>It was insane, really. Seven of the world's eleven schools were under Voldemort's control, but the Pure-Blood families of Afro-Eurasia, for complicated socio-political reasons interrelated with retarded Muggle political disputes, had sided with the Muggle-born and fought back. The nuclear war that Voldemort's Lieutenants had started between all of the world's nuclear powers with Britain's nuclear arsenal—while protecting Britain from the counter-strikes with a massive magical shield raised by all of the Death Eaters working under his control—had been supposed to thin the muggle herds on the planet and guarantee Voldemort's total conquest of the world, as forces aligned with him took over the Wizarding schools and communities in many other parts of the world. But it had also split open the protective veil defending the Wizarding world from detection by Muggles. Because of the failure to decapitate the Wizarding leadership in the whole world simultaneously, that had given Muggles in the countries whose Wizards resisted enough time to adapt to the existence of magic and begin to be motivated to fight back and resist their rule, hand in hand with those Wizards who still opposed them.</p><p>The last four years had been some kind of incomprehensible Hell. Sure, they had killed two billion Muggles, and that was all very nice, but it had also been quite impersonal, and as it turned out, the destruction from the widespread use of nuclear weapons had turned most of the magical creatures and magical beasts of the world against them, and the nuclear winter—admittedly not as bad as it would have been during the Muggle Cold War when there were many more bombs—had caused massive disruption to the food supply in Europe.</p><p>As it turned out, Muggles who were watching their children starve to death were <em>remarkably </em>hard to control, no matter what magic you used on them. So you had to kill more and more and more of them, and then Wizards showed up from Koldovstoretsy-controlled territory like that nasty brute Strelkov, and then Death Eaters in Europe started dying in a hundred new ways that none of them had imagined when they all started on Voldemort's course to ruling the world. Death Eaters… Like her husband, Rodolphus Lestrange, who had been lured into a trap in Budapest two years before.</p><p>Admittedly, she had never cared about him anyway, but it would have been nice to let him raise her little Delphini. Her blessed child with Voldemort. These days, as they grew further apart, as Bellatrix looked at a world so very, very different than the one she thought she would stand at Voldemort's side to rule, Delphini was the only thing that quieted her soul and the Screams that tore through her mind. Voldemort was further and further away as he hid himself—the loss of all the Horcruxes except for Nagini had guaranteed that he was never seen in public, and he spent more and more of his time studying the Dark Arts and less and less time with her, his orders to his Lieutenants for the war effort becoming increasingly erratic.</p><p>Enchanted body-doubles now made all of his appearances outside of his inner circle of Death Eaters, especially since there had been thirty assassination attempts, <em>one of them with nuclear weapons!</em></p><p>Was this supposed to be their future? Assassination attempts, poisonings, nuclear bombs going off, endless wars, leading armies thousands of miles away using endless quantities of Muggle technology that they were <em>supposed to wipe out in favour of Magic, but instead mass-produced to try and win the war? </em></p><p>What kind of joke was this? Was this what she had spent thirty years of her life right up through age fifty loyal to Voldemort for? Was this what she had spent twenty years in Azkaban for? To need her wand in hand even in a bath where the slaves had been strip-searched, scanned, probed, ensorcelled and still might try to kill her? To lose her beauty while thousands of miles from her Love, from Voldemort?</p><p>What the hell was the end-game now? The war just kept going on and on and on. Right now, there was some Chechnyan wizard named Shamil the Old who was leading his six home-schooled children in stiffening Chechen and Ingush fighters in attacking her flank around Kurchaloy, and probably thousands of stupid Muggles were dying but unless she sent some more young purebloods over there to fight them—who might easily die, further reducing their numbers—her forces would be driven back and she'd have to intervene.</p><p>What was the point? Bellatrix started cackling. <em>The point is, there is no end-game, and there never will be. </em>Bellatrix had finally figured it out, and between that and the punishment she had received for failing to stop the loss of the sword all those years before, she found her belief in Voldemort more hollow than it had ever been. In Azkaban, she at least had faith of his return. Now, there was faith in… What? Nothing. She had figured it out: Voldemort very much intended for there to never be an endgame. He intended to live forever, sure. He did <em>not </em>have a plan to end the war, though; the sum of all his plans now was to 'live forever', nothing more and nothing less. The problem was that so far, there was no known way in British wizarding to live forever. It was one of those tricky things which magic tended to recoil from as too far outside of the rules of the way of the Fae.</p><p>But Russian wizarding, buried in its past, very much did have a way to live forever. And it was driving Bellatrix further into madness with envy, because it would work on only one of them, and Voldemort had sent her to retrieve it for him.</p><p>The military campaign was incidental. Bellatrix Lestrange was heading to the Caucasus to find and retrieve for Voldemort nothing less than the Wand of Koschei the Deathless.</p><p>But when Voldemort lived forever, and when Voldemort had conquered the world, and when Voldemort had the Wand of Koschei the Deathless, when Bellatrix was dead from old age with the twenty best years of her life left… When it was just Voldemort and Delphini, what would he do to her daughter? Would he start to see his own daughter as a rival?</p><p>In the part of Bellatrix's mind that was sane enough to love the child of her own body, she increasingly thought that was going to be the case. The mad part of her, conversely, grew increasingly envious the longer she thought about Koschei the Deathless. She was being asked to give immortality to her lover while she aged and died, even as he grew more reclusive, even more psychotic, as the resisting muggles and Wizards proved perfectly willing to do things like set off a nuclear weapon in Edinburgh and accept all the consequent collateral fatalities among their own precious muggles for a failed shot to kill him. <em>That </em>was the Endgame? And her sisters were <em>On the Other Side? </em>What psychotic trick of fate was that!?</p><p>"Madame Lestrange, may you live forever!" One of her Janissary commanders paused at the door, behind the screen which protected her modesty, like she gave a shit about it.</p><p>"Go ahead, Jorge." The salutation that Voldemort had the Janissaries use with Wizards made her soul clench down and grimace: She very much did want to live forever, and she very much wasn't going to get the chance to.</p><p>"The fourth division is in position. We're ready to begin the push on Vladikavkaz."</p><p>Bellatrix smirked. She at least had a moment of pleasure at <em>that. </em>The Confederation of Independent States forces—the wartime coordinating government under the Muggle Leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, but really controlled by the Koldovstoretsy (there was no way Muggles could have organised this war so effectively as to fight Voldemort's forces to a standstill)-were doubtless expecting her to hit the Iron Gates of Derbent as hard as she could with the Janissaries and slog through the radioactive hell around Baku rather than try to advance through the dubious terrain of the central Caucasus and the legendary Chechen insurgents.</p><p>She wasn't a fucking idiot. She was going to advance on Vladikavkaz, deal with Shamil and his sons, annihilate the Muggle population of Chechnya and Ingushetia and seize the Georgian Military Road over the Jvari Pass. Bellatrix had never expected <em>this </em>to be her reward for her twenty years in Azkaban, but she was Bellatrix Lestrange, the greatest Witch of her generation. Muggles would not better her at <em>anything, </em>not even this war which was increasingly fought on their terms.</p><p>"I'll be out in a few minutes, Jorge."</p><p>"May you live forever!" He saluted and spun on heel to step out.</p><p><em>May you live forever… </em>She looked down at the scars on her wrists from Azkaban, and in a secret, hidden part of her mind, thought very bad thoughts, and wished for the killing to begin, and cursed that Grozny was a city already ruined by the Muggles, so she couldn't do the job herself. Still, there were people there, and that would be enough; it would quiet the Screams, for a while.</p><p>For only a while.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>
  <b>Port of Alat, Azerbaijani Coast of the Caspian Sea</b>
</p><p> </p><p>When they arrived at Alat, the full squadron had come back together over the night after proceeding independently. Four big rail ferries, two lorry ferries, and four cargo ships had been escorted by the <em>Tatarstan </em>and two smaller <em>Koni-</em>class frigates, which now sailed on patrol lines off to the east from Gil Island. The smoke rising into the air in the north from Baku was eerie, and occasionally flicked with flames on the horizon to the north-northeast. Two rail ferries and a lorry ferry went in first, as well as the freighters, which were be unloaded at the same time; the ferries would unload faster, but there were fewer specialized docks for them, so they had to unload in two waves. That meant the total unloading process for the ferries and the freighters would take approximately the same length of time.</p><p>This focus on operational logistics was a new part of Hermione’s life. She had always been an intellectual. She had managed to complete six months of infantry officer training and another six months of special training at the Combined Arms Academy over the past four years in rotations back from the front. She carried pocket copies of Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Renatus, and the <em>Strategikon</em> of Maurice, and her Field Manual of Arms was dog-eared. To keep weight down, for comfort she only had Aurelius' <em>Meditations. </em> For magical books, she had Trimble, <em>Basic Hexes for the Busy and Vexed, The Dark Arts Outsmarted, Practical Defensive Magic and its Use Against the Dark Arts</em> , and <em>Self-Defensive Spellwork</em>. Keeping the books down to a bare minimum, they still filled half of her regulation duffel. Ginny had more wizarding books, of course, and Larissa had Russian ones, and they all shared to keep their knowledge up.</p><p><em>They can pry the books from me when I die. </em> It was one source of great pride in the life that she still had. In front of her, the unloading continued. Each of the ferries was designed to carry forty railway wagons. They had been loaded directly with the tank transporters which had carried their T-64s all the way from Gansu for redeployment, with the bogies being swapped at Shankou for the break in gauge. And so in a journey of weeks across thousands of kilometres of the Central Asian desert, the 27 <sup> th </sup> Guards Motor-Rifle Division was heading to the Kavkaz, with several Turkmen armoured regiments reinforcing them. Frankly, war had gotten more interesting when she realised it involved lots of books and maths and railway timetables and sheer scientific complexity.</p><p>Ginny came up to her side with a grin. “Larissa said we could go ashore early, if you like. I brought some chicken from the galley.”</p><p>Ginny’s arrival barely stopped Hermione from habitually going for a cigarette. “Ginny, we’re not docked yet. We’re waiting our turn for a quay.”</p><p>“Wind’s blowing the right way, so…” Ginny cast <em>Arresto Momentum </em>as she pushed them off the rail. Hermione <em>hated </em>using that spell after it barely saved her, but in this case it worked perfectly, and gave the time for the wind to push them down onto the eastern quay. Some of the soldiers on the rail applauded, and Ginny gave a little bow in response. She was still very happy for male attention, though she hadn’t dated anyone at all since Harry.</p><p>Years ago that would have upset Hermione enormously. Now, she had figured out Ginny was going to do it, and had just rolled with it. Ginny’s fierce independence had become even more paramount to her state of being since the hardship of the past years. Since members of her family had started to die in this.</p><p>Hermione flipped her duffel over her shoulder and adjusted her helmet. “So, now we find somewhere to have lunch?”</p><p>“Exactly!” Ginny started off with Hermione, stepping off the quay onto the brown sand and rock of the shore. But they hadn’t gotten far across the barren hills, salt ponds and toward the ramshackle village before they both realised that what was beyond it was not some storage depot or ammunition dump, but a refugee camp. The smell had been the first warning.</p><p>“Oh…” Ginny sighed as she looked out, and saw a group of children run up toward them.</p><p>“əsgəri!” they cried, which Hermione figured meant ‘soldier’ well enough. She could see the rags they were dressed in, and how thin they were, and how it made Ginny want to cry.</p><p>But while Food cannot be Created—that was one of the fundamental laws—it could be <em>duplicated, </em>though it would not be as nutritious and would rot immediately. But that didn’t matter; it would be consumed even faster. The two women looked at each other and without further thought pulled out their lunches of chicken and rice and their wands. It wouldn’t help beyond today, it wouldn’t help beyond this one meal, but for one meal, the children would eat.</p><p>The screams of delight and awe as more and more people from the refugee camp clustered to witness Hermione and Ginny recreate the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes with a little bit of wizarding power were enough to make even Hermione smile. More and more people kept coming until they had almost exhausted Hermione and Ginny, and the two, in exhausted contentment, accepted tea from a lean man with blisters on his face, dressed in the rags of fine clothes.</p><p>“Wonder-workers,” he said, speaking in Russian, which might as well be the <em>lingua franca </em>of the region in the circumstances. “Thank you for helping the children. Allah protect you.”</p><p>“Witches,” Ginny replied with a smile. “Glad to help.”</p><p>The man laughed. “We would not think that word good, but if you say you are witch, then witches are good.”</p><p>“Thank you,” Hermione said softly. “Were you all from Baku?”</p><p>“We are Baku,” he said with some grim pride. “I just came back from a tour.”</p><p>“I thought that Baku was uninhabitable?” Ginny asked in consternation.</p><p>He laughed bitterly. “It is. That’s why we live in the Sychlijar Camp. But we men do three month rotations at the oil fields and the refineries, to keep the petrol flowing for your ships and trains and tanks and fight the fires.” His lean face sank. “We lose a thousand a month to radiation and industrial accidents.”</p><p>“I shouldn’t have asked…” Ginny trailed off, and turned her attention to the children.</p><p>But Hermione looked to the man. “We’re all soldiers, now,” she offered quietly. “All doing our bit to stop Voldemort.”</p><p>The man spat at the sound of the name. “Shaitan himself.”</p><p>“You’re right about that. Want a smoke?” She offered, trying to be friendly.</p><p>“I cough whenever I smoke now,” he grinned blackly. “Not much longer now for me. But every barrel of fuel our towers crack is another step to victory.”</p><p>Hermione turned away and looked down. She imagined the man, choking on the radioactive soot and smoke in Baku, working to keep one of the damaged Cracking Towers at a refinery running. It was the scientific alchemy of Hell. She tried to remember what could be said as a benediction for a Muslim. “Go with God,” she offered.</p><p>“<em>Tawakkaltu Ala-Allah,” </em>the Azerbaijani man offered in return in liturgical Arabic, and then he turned quietly away, to watch the children who for one meal had full bellies, and smile.</p><p>As he did, a rumbling cut through the ground. Hermione and Ginny tensed with the reflexes of veterans. Then, coming around a curve, they saw a locomotive swinging down the embankment on the broad-gauge line from Baku. A massive Red Star surmounted the armoured snout as a wisp of soot from the exhaust stack indicated this engine was in better condition than most, despite the massive welded slabs of steel down the side.</p><p>Despite everything, Hermione’s heart caught in her chest and she leapt up in excitement. It was an <em>armoured train, </em>and a real one too, purpose-built, not improvised. With the airbrakes hissing and popping, it slowed to a stop on the main-line, Russian flags flying overhead, and Red Stars painted on it for recognition markings.</p><p>“Ginny, that’s an armoured train. A <em>Russian </em>one, so it retreated from the North. You don’t think…?”</p><p>“Well, they should at least know!” Both of them made haste, hoping against hope.</p><p>And for once, in the middle of uncertainty, death, starvation, combat, a little, tiny dream came true.</p><p>An absurd figure wearing a green skirt and a Cossack’s blouse, a cherkeska, with blonde hair in a braid and a massive pair of smoke-tinted tanker’s goggles, with a sword buckled to her side and her rifle on her shoulder with roses stuffed in the barrel, descended from the train with an eager shout of her own. A massive burly Tajik man with a full black beard followed her with a Papasha submachinegun in hand, with a trace of concern evident through his beard.</p><p>“HERMIONE! GINNY!”</p><p>Hermione shouted right back. “LUNA! I was so worried when I heard that they took Makhachkala!”</p><p>Luna Lovegood reached out and spun into an embrace with Hermione Granger, still wearing those giant tankers' goggles. “We were attacked with armour-piercers,” she said in exaggerated excitement. “By <em>Janissaries.</em> But I used <em>Impedimenta</em> on their <em>auto-loaders, </em> and six of their tanks blew up and we <em>got away</em> ! And then I was given tea and we stopped and we found these flowers, but they’re getting sort of dry, so I fixed them.” Closer in, Hermione could see that instead of fake musket cartridges or <em>gazyr, </em>the blouse held potion bottles. Leave it to Luna to come up with something so clever. Hermione immediately wanted one.</p><p>“By Merlin, Luna, did you have to retreat through <em>Baku?” </em>Ginny asked delicately, still feeling a little sick over the conversations with the man.</p><p>“Oh no, there’s a railway to the west of Baku, and that’s the way we came,” Luna answered, and peeled off from Hermione to give Ginny a big hug, too. “I LOVE Armoured Trains. They’re so neat, and so rare, but everyone likes them! They’re like the Crumple-Horned Snorkack of the Military World,” she said, like she was confiding a very important secret.</p><p>Hermione shook her head, and looked at the man who was obviously Luna Lovegood’s muggle bodyguard. He looked back.</p><p>“You’re friends of her’s?” He asked.</p><p>“Yes. Schoolmates.”</p><p>He nodded. “She’s happy to see you,” he added laconically. “I’m Farrukh, so she calls me ‘happy’.”</p><p>Hermione shook her head. “Want a smoke, Farrukh?”</p><p>“Sure.”</p><p>Hermione gave him a Belomor and a light. “She is something else, isn’t she?” She gestured to Luna, while the woman talked to Ginny.</p><p>Farrukh took a drag on his cigarette and looked very, very serious toward Hermione. “She is a Mad Fakhira, and it is well-known that Allah protects the Mad. I would rather be at her side than anywhere else in this war.”</p><p><em>I’ve found someone who takes Luna seriously. </em>Hermione blinked, and took a drag on the cigarette she’d lit up, herself. Shaking her head, she looked down to where the unloading of the freighters was continuing. The cranes on the quay were lifting artillery pieces and pallets of ammunition off, and setting them down on railway wagons. Large numbers of men, who she now realised were from the refugee camp, were securing them to the wagons with chains.</p><p>Hermione saw some movement, and jerked her head around to see a column of four UAZ-469’s approaching. In one of the middle ones was a woman in a uniform like her own service uniform in the MKPФ (министерство колдовства Российской Федерации), the Ministry of Witchcraft of the Russian Federation. But with the massive number of stars on her epaulettes, Hermione realised in surprise that she must be the Actual State Councillor of the Azerbaijani Ministry. Her hair was grey, her expression severe, as she dismounted when the UAZ screeched to a halt.</p><p>“Junior Councillor of Witchcraft Granger?” She asked. It was the equivalent of being an Army Major, so that was normally what her comrades called her in the field for convenience. But the Actual State Councillor for Azerbaijan was not exactly a comrade.</p><p>“Ma’am!” Hermione dropped the cigarette, came to attention and saluted.</p><p>“Good to meet you in person. I am Nuray Hajinsky, the Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Go ahead and smoke, Junior Councillor.”</p><p>Hermione sheepishly retrieved it. Even cigarettes were too precious to waste these days. “You wanted to talk with me?”</p><p>“Well, first I want this armoured train off the mainline!”</p><p>Luna looked sheepishly at the woman as her voice picked up. “Oh right.” She gave Ginny a last hug. “Sorry, Hermione!” And ran back for the train.</p><p>Hermione shielded her eyes. “Sorry, ma’am.”</p><p>“No worries. Walk with me, Junior Councillor. You were told about the reason we’re being reinforced here in the Kavkaz?”</p><p>“Yes, General Pronichev told me in some detail, Ma’am.”</p><p>“Well, good, but we’ve got a problem,” State Councillor Hajinsky murmured. “We thought that they would attack the Iron Gates again, so we were planning on reinforcing Derbent. Good enough to stop Gog and Magog, good enough stop Hitler, good enough to stop Yaxley—good enough to stop Bellatrix Lestrange.”</p><p>“She jinked back west again, didn’t she?”</p><p>“Exactly. Her Janissary divisions started moving out for Grozny this morning. That means she’s going to try and force the Jvari Pass. With winter coming on. It sounds insane, but remember that Bellatrix was the Death Eater who led her troops over the Simplon Pass in winter to conquer Italy.”</p><p>Hermione grimaced. “Still, that puts them far away from the oil.” She shook her head. “I suppose the Georgian Military Road,” she tried to keep her geography straight, “goes right into Tbilisi, doesn’t it?”</p><p>“It does, but Tbilisi was hit by three nuclear weapons. It’s not really so important. There’s another one of you English who is working on a lead. The 27<sup>th</sup> will pass through Tbilisi—the railway has been repaired--and start to deploy at Dzegvi. You’ll meet your contact there.”</p><p>“Do you know who it is?” Hermione answered.</p><p>“I’m afraid not,” the older woman replied. “Well, I was also asked to give you something else,” she added, and fishing in her pocket, produced a scroll that she handed to Hermione. “Moskva MinKol asked me to present this to you,” she finished with a flourish, using the common abbreviation for the Ministry of Witchcraft in Russian.</p><p>Hermione unfolded it, and the enchanted scroll played a short ditty of the opening chords to the famous military song <em>V ‘Put, </em> “Let’s Go”. As it did, the State Seal of the Ministry of Witchcraft glowed in red, white and blue above the paper. <em>By Order of Georgii Borisovich Sorokin, </em> <em>Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft, </em> <em>Hermione </em> <em>Alanovna</em> <em> Granger is hereby promoted to the rank of Councillor of Witchcraft </em> <em>for the Russian Federation.</em></p><p>Alan was not her father’s real name, of course. But she needed a patronymic, and the further it threw off the Death-Eaters, the better. She had no idea if her parents were still alive, but…</p><p>Between actually being able to help the children, however briefly, and thinking about her parents, Hermione felt wet hot tears splash on her cheeks without ever really feeling any of the other sensations of crying. “Thank you, ma’am.”</p><p>The elder Azerbaijani witch put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re going to finish the job,” she offered, with an iron reservoir of confidence. “There <em>will </em>be a future for humanity and wizarding kind. And starting a counteroffensive with Bellatrix Lestrange’s head on a pike would be a nice gesture to Voldemort back in London. I have ever confidence in you, my child. Present your wand to the enemy, and show no mercy.”</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Outskirts of Grozny, Chechen Republic, Occupied Russian Federation</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix had Apparated to Gudermes on the eastern approach to Grozny as her Janissary divisions fronted a mass of ensorcelled troops and monsters driving toward the already-ruined city. The Chally II’s which equipped the elite Janissary units were on the advance, still being mass-produced in the largely intact United Kingdom with their superb Chobham Armour, were like so much chaff to Bellatrix’s interests, but her lower-ranking wizards, the Pureblood Wannabes who aspired to becoming Death Eaters themselves, could be relied upon to enchant the precious vehicles for additional protection, or else.</p><p>She knew that they really needed to seize the railway intact, or else they’d have problems. It was the only real way the muggles had for moving large quantities of goods across land, and muggle armies needed large quantities of goods. <em> Her </em> Army needed large quantities of goods. <em> Her </em> Army was a damned <em> muggle </em>Army.</p><p>And if she wanted to win, and live, she was damned well going to fight like one. Because she was not going to give up yet. She still had a life to live. She still had Delphini. And <em> fucking muggles </em>wouldn’t be the reason that Voldemort killed her. If he was going to do that, she was going to give him a better reason.</p><p>So she was going to break through the ruins of Grozny in record time. The shells were laid out in front of her, with Green Crosses on them, a peculiar design. Men in the janissaries were muttering softly, and making sure it was slaves and captives who positioned them. Muggle items could be enchanted—cars could be made to fly, tanks could be made resistant to magic, too—but weapons rarely were. Either it was a magical weapon, or it was a muggle weapon. There was no particular spell that would make a shell more lethal.</p><p>Except when the shell was empty, and custom designed merely as a dispenser for a very muggle kind of potion. <em> They really are remarkable at finding new ways to kill each other, </em>Bellatrix thought as she walked along the lines of gas shells, and the slaves worked at the delicate process of loading her potion from a great iron vat into them.</p><p>It was then that she paused, hearing screams from some of the houses nearby. The high-pitched shouts froze her in place. For all they were coming from muggle animals, at the hands of muggle animals, they sounded altogether very much like her <em> own. </em></p><p>Ignoring the work, Bellatrix was frozen in place. She didn’t know where to begin, as the memories hammered her. The memories that she would never let anyone see, <em> anyone. </em>Not with Legilimency, not with anything. The memories that were the reason for the promise Voldemort had given her. The promise that he had betrayed over the Sword. A betrayal which had come with beautiful Delphini, a betrayal which meant she was nothing more than another Death Eater.</p><p>A betrayal that meant she could trust no-one at all.</p><p>She was frozen in place, but it didn’t really matter at all, because the men were still working. Her Janissaries and her slaves were still working, and they would keep working until she told them to stop. They certainly knew better, even the officers, than to disturb her, or question her, or care if she was in a reverie, or even using some kind of magic to prepare to face the enemy. One did not question a Death Eater when one was a muggle, and expect to live. One obeyed, or one perished, no matter how ‘important’ of a muggle that one was.</p><p>It was for that reason that she did not think twice when the moment seized her. “Jorge!” she called out to her Chief of Staff. “I want you to have the soldiers let those women go.”</p><p>“May You Live Forever, Madame,” he answered with a salute and stepped forward, rubbing a gloved hand over his short-cropped sandy-brown hair. “Madame, the men…”</p><p>“Obey,” Bellatrix answered flatly. She very nearly killed him then and there, except that then she would have to go find someone else with the authority to order the soldiers to stop. And he was a Janissary Officer, valued, at least. So the eldest Black daughter deigned to provide an explanation. “They are distracting me, but there is no value in shooting them, we need slaves in this region and the men always fight to the death. So I want you to make the men stop, and I want you to let them go.”</p><p>Jorge stiffened. “It will lower morale before the action. Do you have a recommendation, Madame?”</p><p>“We are still on our supply lines, and I suspect there will be sustained action so there will be little opportunity for Firewhisky, so distribute a double-ration to the men before the attack in order to encourage them,” Bellatrix snapped. “Now execute your instructions.”</p><p>“May You Live Forever, Madame!”</p><p>He turned back to the Command Track that they had brought up for her. Muggles and subordinates handled most of the coordination, but Bellatrix was aware that she had to make sure that the general intent of her orders was followed, otherwise some fucking idiot would lead an entire division of ensorcelled supporting troops into a swamp and humiliate her before the Dark Lord. The assault on Jvari Pass was a precision, high-speed operation in which hours counted. She had to lead it in person.</p><p>But what she was actually interested in was enchanting the potions in person. That was <em> Wizarding </em>work, unlike leading the Army. The brief confrontation with Jorge had disrupted her concentration. That made the Screams fade away, and that was not a bad thing. The screams in the buildings were fading away as well, as the order spread. There was a part of her that was still very uncomfortable when confronted with reminders of her upbringing in the lives and fates of muggles.</p><p>It made it seem like they were almost people. That wasn’t upsetting, but it was unsettling, like the first time you pulled up a Mandrake and it seemed almost sapient. <em> That’s it. </em></p><p>She smiled, baring her rotted, wrecked teeth to a world which, in this time and place, did not care in the slightest. The nearest enemy position was about fifteen kilometres ahead in Argun, and Grozny, less than thirty-two kilometres away, could be hit by her artillery with ease. She just had to finish the work on preparing the potion for the shells…</p><p>The radio clipped to her belt crackled. “Madame, incoming 2 o’clock high!”</p><p>Bellatrix lurched up and without thinking flipped her wand up and cast <em> Protego, </em>in the variation she had specialised for these occasions.</p><p>It saved her, her command track, Jorge, the shells they were working on, and her potions from the tracks of cluster bombs, as a group of <em> shapes </em>tore through the sky above her. The terrifying roar of attack jets going supersonic at low altitude came seconds later as flares, chaff and decoys tore out from the aircraft.</p><p>Bombs ricocheted off her <em> Protego </em> in random wild directions, hitting some of the artillery pieces—but they had plenty—and knocking out a few tanks. They skipped randomly into houses in the city, too, and the explosions would be followed by screams soon enough. But not <em>her</em> screams.</p><p>Bellatrix knew how this game was played by the muggles. Instead of following up on the temptation to cast a spell against the fleeing jets, she raised <em> Protego </em> again. That saved her from the <em> second </em>wave, intended to take advantage of any wizards who had committed the amateur hour mistake of destroying the jets that were no longer threats and dropping their shields to do so. A second wave of bombs ricocheted crazily through the town in consequence to their interaction with the magical shield.</p><p>A smirked touched her lips as her Chief of Staff stepped back over to her side. “What were they, Jorge?”</p><p>“Fencers, at maybe fifty meters,” he answered with a shrug. “Harassment attack.” It was a pretty common game now. If the Wizards tried to kill the bombers, one of them might just fuck up and die. It happened more than Bellatrix would like to admit. “The Rapier SAMs with the 3<sup>rd</sup> Janissary Division are engaging now, Madame. We might get a few.”</p><p>Bellatrix ignored the comment, that was more relevant to Jorge than to her. There were screams in the city from wounded muggles, but they were not <em>her </em>Screams. She fixed on the fact that the muggles had killed and wounded their own kind in a <em>failed </em>attempt to kill Wizards, and let it soak into her tortured soul. It kept the madness comfortably at bay.</p><p>She wondered, idly, if the muggles had evacuated their civilians from Grozny.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>Note: Please skip directly to Chapter 3. Chapter 2 is a mirror due to a databasing issue with AO3 I cannot fix on my own.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Notes (continued in the notes section):</p><p>Turkmenbashi - The largest port on the Caspian coast of Turkmenistan, it was renamed from Krasnovodsk by the regime of The Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan's post-Soviet dictator.<br/>
Cartridge start - Some diesel engines, and actually not just in Russia, are actually compression started by setting off the powder charge from a bullet, without the bullet of course. This is called a cartridge.<br/>
papirosa - this is an extremely strong, unfiltered, primitive cigarette with the end you smoke surrounded by a cardboard tube that you pinch in your fingers to hold and smoke from. The Belomorkanals that Hermione is smoking are a real brand, named after Stalin's massive construction effort of the White Sea Canal (which after all is what Belomorkanal means) in the 1930s. They are cheap and strong and represent exactly what a soldier would smoke.<br/>
Makhachkala - City on the northeast of the Caucasus on the Caspian shore.<br/>
Alat - A small port with rail access south of Baku.<br/>
AKM - Used for the AK-47M and AK-74M (referring to the second in this case), basically simplified and improved variants of those assault rifles.<br/>
papakha - a kind of hat cossacks wear, furry with sheep's wool<br/>
bakelite - Plastic-like material you'd see cigarette trays made out of in the 60s.<br/>
lezginka - A kind of dance.<br/>
"Registered Cossack of the Orenburg Host" - this is a legal term and a cultural term. Legally, "Registered Cossack" means someone who is in one of the Cossack hosts recognised for paramilitary duties by the government of Russia. It also means a certain mannerism, style of address, and lifestyle, and group affiliation. But each host also has uniforms which means for purposes of concealment, someone might be wearing one even when they don't belong to this group - if it's convenient and they're important. In the old days of the Empire, aristocrats might have several regiments they were affiliated with and have a uniform for each one<br/>
Vashe Blagorodie, Gospoda Udacha - Your Honour, Lady Luck - a famous song from the iconic Soviet movie "White Sun of the Desert".<br/>
Naftalan crude - a kind of crude oil from the Caucasus region that people bathe in because of its reputed healing powers.<br/>
Janissaries - Ottoman slave-soldiers who were raised from a young age for military service and were the Ottoman Empire's elite soldiers. The term here is used to refer to muggle troops who volunteered to serve Voldemort, mostly because the Death Eaters don't care what they're called and because they adopted it out of pride when their enemies (i.e., the CIS and allies) started calling them that. Russia has a long cultural history of fighting Janissaries.<br/>
Koldovstoretsy - This just means "People of Koldovstoretz", i.e., Witches and Wizards in the CIS.<br/>
Jvari Pass / Georgian Military Road - this refers to a famous route constructed by the Russian Army to access Tbilisi from the city of Vladikavkaz across the Caucasus mountains. It's quite rugged going, but at the end of the day, it is just a road. "Military Road" is just part of the name because it was built by the old Imperial Army.<br/>
Tatarstan -- The name of a Russian Navy surface action ship of slightly less than 2,000 tons full load displacement, around 102 metres in length. Armed with anti-ship and anti-air missiles, in 2002 it is the flagship of the Caspian Flotilla.<br/>
T-64 -- The front-line Main Battle Tank of the Soviet Ground Forces during the 1960s - 1970s and in service to the present; it saw heavy action in the Donbass, and is unique due to the automatic loading cannon, three-man crew, and very high ground speed.<br/>
Kavkaz -- Transliteration from Russian of Caucasus.<br/>
27th Guards Motor-Rifle Division -- the formation Hermione is attached to  -- this is the equivalent of a mechanized division in the west.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Tawakkaltu Ala-Allah -- "In Allah we place our trust", essentially; a common Islamic benediction.<br/>Armoured Train -- The Russian military still has two in service, these are special railway rakes, heavily armoured, with tanks and armoured vehicles on them which can dismount and engage the enemy, and gun turrets and anti-air weapons. They were used heavily in Chechnya. Like a lot of old Soviet equipment in the 90s, the one Luna is on still has its red stars. They have something of a cultural cult status due to movies like "Turbins' Days" among many others ((A clip -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_jNLK5Ub-I)).<br/>Junior Councillor of Witchcraft -- Hermione's rank before being promoted to Councillor of Witchcraft. Junior Councillor, which is also Larissa's rank, is the equivalent of Major in the table of ranks of the Russian Federation, but MinKol, the Ministry of Witchcraft, maintains its own ranks and unified service. These ranks are modelled on the ranks of the Russian State Prosecution Service, which is actually a uniformed but non-military service -- so the Russian Ministry.<br/>Councillor of Witchcraft -- the rank Hermione was promoted to, the equivalent of Lt. Col.<br/>Witch, 1st Class -- What Ginny's rank is, the equivalent of an Army Captain.<br/>Actual State Councillor of Witchcraft -- This rank is a uniformed equivalent in Russia and the CIS countries to the Minister of Magic. In a military order of precedence it's afforded the same status as General of the Army.<br/>Chally II -- Short-form for the British Challenger II Main Battle Tank, being used as the primary tank by Voldemort's Janissary forces.<br/>Chobham Armour-- the composite (layered ceramics, steel, depleted uranium, etc) armour used by the Challenger II.<br/>Chief of Staff -- in military terms, the person with the job of coordinating operations for the commander. Probably the most important single position in a military unit, more important than the Commander.<br/>Command Track - a specialized tracked vehicle for transporting command staff close to the front line.<br/>MinKol -- This is the short-form for министерство колдовства Российской Федерации -- Ministerstvo koldovstva Rossiyskoy Federatsii -- Ministry of Witchcraft of the Russian Federation. It uses the first syllables of "Ministry" and "Witchcraft" and is therefore a pretty typical form of an abbreviation of a Russian Ministry.<br/>Rapier SAM -- A British mobile army surface to air missile launcher intended for short range engagements.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. The Caspian Sea.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Due to an ongoing AO3 databasing issue, Chapter 1 is duplicated as Chapter 2. Please skip directly to Chapter 3 when you have finished reading Chapter 1--the story is complete and you aren't missing anything. My apologies about this, but as the mere author, there's nothing I can do. :-)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>The Caspian</strong>
</p><p><em>If some on the side of the enemy desert to come to your service, if they be loyal, they will always make you a great acquisition; for the forces of the adversary diminish more with the loss of those who flee, than with those who are killed, even though the name of the fugitives is suspect to the new friends, and odious to the old. – </em>Machiavelli, <em>The Art of War.</em></p><p>"Hermione, is this anything like a Muggle cruise? From before, I mean."</p><p>Hermione Granger slowly sat down the book, and ran a hand through her short hair. She understood what Ginny <em>really </em>meant by the offhanded comment, and looked up to her friend with her long hair braided sharply down her back and a bow near the top. "A little bit. There would be less smoke, though. The deck chairs would be nicer."</p><p>"Oh, well, they seem nice enough. The sea is very blue. There's this nice chicken and rice dish they sell down in the galley; I think it has mint in it," Ginny continued.</p><p>Hermione knew what was going to come next. She closed her eyes and started fumbling through the pockets of her field blouse for her pack of Belomors. "It probably is better than the field rations," she agreed mildly.</p><p>"Well, anyway… Don't you think there's enough smoke already?"</p><p>"It's the wrong kind," Hermione answered, reaching up to rub at one of her eyes and stare at the perfect blue reflection of the Caspian Sea, glinting in the white sun of the desert. "Ron sent another letter, didn't he?"</p><p>"He did," Ginny affirmed, and sighed, and made to sit down next to Hermione, which restored to the other witch a fading view of Turkmenbashi on the shore behind them. "You know that he's doing what has to be done against Voldemort. We <em>all </em>are. It's been so hard for him, since Harry died and we lost Hogwarts… We lost England…"</p><p>Hermione finished striking up the harsh Russian papirosa. She knew they would kill her someday, and she liked that thought very much. Until then, she'd have to fight. A part of her wanted to leave her friend be on the deck-chairs, as the heavy diesel exhaust wafted overhead from the straining, ancient, poorly maintained engines. <em>They probably use cartridge start, </em>Hermione thought to distract herself, musing that surely on Russians would ever come up with an idea so absurdly, well, <em>Russian, </em>as to start an engine with a gun cartridge. She could get up, and walk over to the fantail, where Alexandra and the other officers were already smoking. There was a key difference between her and Ginny, in the eyes of their comrades: Ginny was a Witch.</p><p>Hermione was also a witch—but she was an <em>officer. </em>Sergei Alexeivich, one of Major Alexandra Rostislavna Lukachenko's direct subordinates, tossed her a cheerful wave and a knowing grin to distract her, and it made Hermione crack a grin, too. She was tempted to go over and socialise with Alexandra and her officers—their battalion was dedicated to supporting Hermione's contingent of wizards—but it would make Ginny upset.</p><p>"You're not even going to read it, are you?" Ginny pleaded. Her braid fit with a lot of the Russian women in uniform, who tended to keep their hair long in a braid with a bow when they were not in combat—she had managed to fit in. A lot of the witches from Koldovstoretz did the same now.</p><p>"Maybe later. Enjoy the deck-chairs, Ginny."</p><p>"Hermione…"</p><p>"I'm going to get some chicken," her friend answered, and started toward the doors to belowdecks with the cigarette dangling from her lips. The excuse, at least, gave everyone an honourable way out, and Ginny sank into one of the chairs and tried to relax.</p><p>It was late 2002, almost five years after the Battle of Hogwarts, and nobody in the world cared about whether or not you smoked indoors anymore. No, there were plenty of other things that would kill you first. Like the cloud of smoke they were sailing towards, the massive billowing black clouds from the oil wells at Baku which were still burning, four years after six nuclear weapons hit the city.</p><p>From the multi-sided nuclear war that Voldemort had started to "cull the muggle herd" when he openly took power in Britain. From Hermione, Ron, Ginny and everyone she cared about <em>failing. </em></p><p>From Harry dying.</p><p>Hermione stuffed the pocket copy of Machiavelli's <em>Art of War</em> into her fatigues, and couldn't quite remember ever seeing a sea as beautiful as this one. But it brought no comfort to her heart. Pausing at the doors which protected the stairs going belowdecks, she took a last look, to the first ferry that was carrying Turkmen troops and travelling right ahead of them, to the Russian frigate <em>Tatarstan </em>standing off her starboard quarter.</p><p>High up in the tops of the frigate's radar masts, the two lonely wizards on air guard looked like any other soldiers with their massive greatcoats pulled close against the cold wind; fully exposed to the sea breeze, they were much cooler than Hermione and Ginny on the fantail. Ahead off the starboard bow, the smoke from Baku, even though it was hundreds of klicks away, could indeed be seen fouling the sky under the white desert sun. It complicated the job of those wizards, who would have only bare seconds to save the ships from a magical attack originating from Makhachkala, the southernmost position of Voldemort's forces on the Caspian sea, but it also served like a smoke-screen for the route between Turkmenbashi and Alat, the Caspian port of Azerbaijan to which they were bound.</p><p>Hermione sighed, shouldered her AKM, and went below. As promised, there was chicken and rice, and the chicken had some kind of mint yoghurt sauce. And there was a pleasant surprise, too, one of the few new friends she had made in this terrible new world of smoke, soot, snow, and smert (or, Russian for death, to give her four s's). Larissa Sergeivna Naryshkina was dancing a Cossack's lezginka to a tune provided by a balalaika and an accordion.</p><p>Hermione dashed out her cigarette in one of the old bakelite trays on the table and took a guilty moment to admire a new friend for less than platonic reasons. The aristocratic Larissa was from one of the purest of pure-blood Russian wizarding families, and filled out her uniform very well, with her dark hair pinned up under the papakha of the uniform of a Registered Cossack of the Orenburg Host, and shining blue eyes as rich as the Caspian's waves.</p><p>Finishing her song, she went for the samovar. "Tea, Hermione?" By now, Hermione's Russian was perfectly good. She was still good at studying, she wouldn't give that up for anything, wouldn't stop until she was dead. It was the last thing that was normal.</p><p>"Certainly."</p><p>Larissa was at her side a heartbeat later with two cups. It was all the same intense Russian zavarka, boiled to a syrup from tea bricks and then diluted with hot water, but Larissa put cherry preserves into her's, and Hermione took some condensed milk from the galley. The men with the musical instruments had switched to singing <em>Vashe Blagorodie, Gospoda Udacha </em>('Your Honour, Lady Luck'). The verse they were on went something like:</p><p>"<em>Your Honour, Lady Luck,</em></p><p>
  <em>To some you are kind, to some otherwise.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Wait, don't call for the 9 grams into the heart.</em>
</p><p><em>I'm unlucky in death, will be lucky in love.</em>"</p><p>The diesels made the table shake, but the low one-meter waves they were running head on into, the old Soviet steel hull handled well, even though it had been so streaked with rust when they boarded that Ginny had gotten a queasy look on her face.</p><p>"You're lost in a reverie again." Larissa was one of the kindest pure-bloods Hermione had ever known, not at all bigoted to her, and very perceptive, but she was very much ignoring the cossack officer who was now dancing to try and get her attention. Friends, yes, but she would likely <em>never </em>even <em>think </em>of a muggle-born that way, let alone a <em>muggle</em> in that way.</p><p>"My ex-boyfriend wrote me a letter again."</p><p>"Strelkov," Larissa muttered, using Ron's <em>nom de guerre </em>instead of his name, and turning her own attention to eye her gun against the wall. Wizards didn't need them, but they carried them so they couldn't immediately be identified <em>as </em>Wizards in a mass of soldiers.</p><p>"Yes." Hermione took a drink of her tea, still blazing hot as they drank it in Central Asia, though the condensed milk had taken the edge off. "He wants to get back together, but I … What he did to those collaborators in Chisinau, Larissa. I can't."</p><p>Larissa sipped her tea. "Most people consider his actions heroic. Even among the most courageous, there aren't many Wizards volunteering to fight behind Voldemort's lines. Isn't he in Poland now?"</p><p>"That's what they say, but nobody knows. Operational security, you know."</p><p>"Got to keep the constant tension up," Larissa murmured. It was true; the 'strategy of tension', muggles weren't terribly effective at fighting Voldemort by themselves, but even a few wizards with them could make an insurgency terribly effective, it forced a wizard to constantly be on his or her toes, they could never relax, never calm down, never let down their guards, or a single shot in the dark, or a cup of poison, or a dagger or a suicide bomb would be the end of them. The objective, quite simply, was to make the lives of Voldemort's Death Eaters in occupied Europe a living Hell, or, as it had been put at the time, 'since we can't put them back in Azkaban, we will bring Azkaban to them.'</p><p>"It's a licence for endless murder," Hermione answered.</p><p>"Wars happen, shit gets broken," Larissa shrugged. "But, I understand why you're uncomfortable. It changes a man. Five years of this, three billion dead…"</p><p>"Maybe I just don't want men anymore." Hermione wanted to get up, wanted to invite Larissa up-deck for a smoke, she wanted the gun to not be a weight on her shoulder. Instead, she forced herself to finish eating her chicken, because after the starving children that she had seen in Donetsk during their retreat from the Ukraine, she could never leave even a single grain of rice on her plate again without feeling a crushing blow of guilt.</p><p>Now Voldemort's armies were on the Volga, filled with slaves forced to fight for him. But he would not get past the Volga, and thousands were dying every day to keep it so. Muggle wars could last for <em>decades. </em>Now, Hermione felt, a wizard one would, too.</p><p>"Do you know what we're going to Azerbaijan for? They wouldn't even tell me and I'm a Senior Councillor of Magic," Larissa gestured to the three bronze stars on her epaulettes. Russians had ranks and uniforms for everything, and Larissa kept those rank tabs even semi-under-cover as a Registered Cossack.</p><p>"Five ranks down from the top," Hermione teased her, feeling better when she finished her food and reminding her friend that despite the grand title, it was actually a pretty common rank.</p><p>Larissa twisted a mock glare at her.</p><p>"So, yes, I do," Hermione allowed. "I can't tell you much, but…" Her voice dropped to a whisper.</p><p>"Voldemort has sent Bellatrix Lestrange to the Caucasus front with two divisions of the Janissary Corps. And we don't know why. But with that…"</p><p>Larissa's eager smile had frozen on her face. The Janissaries were Voldemort's best troops: They were <em>volunteers. </em>Bellatrix was the most powerful surviving Death Eater. "Bozhe moi," she whispered. "We're in for it now."</p><p>"Yeah," Hermione forced out. "Let's go have a smoke." Hermione Granger was only twenty-three years old, but she felt like she could be fifty.</p><p>Larissa smiled and got up with her. "Sure. I'm going to get a crude oil treatment when we get to Naftalan, I swear… You should too, the desert is hard on the skin. Six months in Gansu with our Chinese allies, I didn't think we'd ever get off that front…"</p><p>"Fuck my skin," Hermione mumbled, reaching again for her pack of Belomors. She remembered the kind soldiers who had given her a pack on the night that she had learned how many people had died in the nuclear war Voldemort started. She had wandered away from where the British wizard refugees were staying, crying, horrified at her failure. The cancer-sticks were a sort of self-flagellation that had brought her comfort on that night, and she'd never looked back.</p><p>As she reached for them, though, her sleeve pulled back a bit, and she saw part of the scar and tugged it down sharply again. "Fuck my skin." Cursing in Russian was about the only thing that made her feel good about <em>that. </em>"I don't want another boyfriend, so it doesn't matter. But I'm sure Ginny will go with you if you ask her." <em>This is the future? This! </em>She hung on the rail and smoked and looked out over the sea, and wished with all of her heart that Harry was still alive, that there was <em>something </em>to look forward to instead of endless war.</p>
<hr/><p>Bellatrix Lestrange sank deeper into the crude oil bath. She had been assured it would take years off her skin if she did it every day for ten minutes a day, the heavy Naftalan crude having been plundered from the tanks at the terminal in the city of Makhachkala when their troops took it. And if there was one thing that Bellatrix would try at this point in her life, it was anything to recover her youth.</p><p>Half the city had been wrecked in the fighting. Leading fanatical Dagestani irregulars who came out of the hills shouting 'Allahuackbar!' as they attacked, a small group of Koldovstoretsy, as the Russian wizards called themselves, had hit Yaxley's slave-soldiers in the flank when they had been advancing toward the Iron Gates of Derbent. Yaxley's Army and half the younger wizards under his command had been slain, and he had been recalled to London in disgrace, officially for his defeat. Of course, the twelve Koldovstoretsy involved in the operation and most of their Dagestani troops had been wiped out, but first they had stopped cold an advance by Voldemort's forces into the Caucasus for at least six months.</p><p>In fact, though, Bellatrix knew the real reason for the recall order for Yaxley was that Voldemort wanted to use his most reliable Death Eater (her) for a very special mission. It was a mission to the Caucasus, a mission of great personal importance to the Dark Lord and self-proclaimed Emperor of Earth. The kind of mission which had led to her being given two divisions of Janissaries, the only troops that they really had who could fight man for man on even terms with the motivated armies of the surviving Muggle nations, whose military equipment had been enchanted again and again by the wizards of Koldovstoretz, Wahemaya and Rìyuè until pretty much all of it that still survived had some kind of magical protection.</p><p>It was insane, really. Seven of the world's eleven schools were under Voldemort's control, but the Pure-Blood families of Afro-Eurasia, for complicated socio-political reasons interrelated with retarded Muggle political disputes, had sided with the Muggle-born and fought back. The nuclear war that Voldemort's Lieutenants had started between all of the world's nuclear powers with Britain's nuclear arsenal—while protecting Britain from the counter-strikes with a massive magical shield raised by all of the Death Eaters working under his control—had been supposed to thin the muggle herds on the planet and guarantee Voldemort's total conquest of the world, as forces aligned with him took over the Wizarding schools and communities in many other parts of the world. But it had also split open the protective veil defending the Wizarding world from detection by Muggles. Because of the failure to decapitate the Wizarding leadership in the whole world simultaneously, that had given Muggles in the countries whose Wizards resisted enough time to adapt to the existence of magic and begin to be motivated to fight back and resist their rule, hand in hand with those Wizards who still opposed them.</p><p>The last four years had been some kind of incomprehensible Hell. Sure, they had killed two billion Muggles, and that was all very nice, but it had also been quite impersonal, and as it turned out, the destruction from the widespread use of nuclear weapons had turned most of the magical creatures and magical beasts of the world against them, and the nuclear winter—admittedly not as bad as it would have been during the Muggle Cold War when there were many more bombs—had caused massive disruption to the food supply in Europe.</p><p>As it turned out, Muggles who were watching their children starve to death were <em>remarkably </em>hard to control, no matter what magic you used on them. So you had to kill more and more and more of them, and then Wizards showed up from Koldovstoretsy-controlled territory like that nasty brute Strelkov, and then Death Eaters in Europe started dying in a hundred new ways that none of them had imagined when they all started on Voldemort's course to ruling the world. Death Eaters… Like her husband, Rodolphus Lestrange, who had been lured into a trap in Budapest two years before.</p><p>Admittedly, she had never cared about him anyway, but it would have been nice to let him raise her little Delphini. Her blessed child with Voldemort. These days, as they grew further apart, as Bellatrix looked at a world so very, very different than the one she thought she would stand at Voldemort's side to rule, Delphini was the only thing that quieted her soul and the Screams that tore through her mind. Voldemort was further and further away as he hid himself—the loss of all the Horcruxes except for Nagini had guaranteed that he was never seen in public, and he spent more and more of his time studying the Dark Arts and less and less time with her, his orders to his Lieutenants for the war effort becoming increasingly erratic.</p><p>Enchanted body-doubles now made all of his appearances outside of his inner circle of Death Eaters, especially since there had been thirty assassination attempts, <em>one of them with nuclear weapons!</em></p><p>Was this supposed to be their future? Assassination attempts, poisonings, nuclear bombs going off, endless wars, leading armies thousands of miles away using endless quantities of Muggle technology that they were <em>supposed to wipe out in favour of Magic, but instead mass-produced to try and win the war? </em></p><p>What kind of joke was this? Was this what she had spent thirty years of her life right up through age fifty loyal to Voldemort for? Was this what she had spent twenty years in Azkaban for? To need her wand in hand even in a bath where the slaves had been strip-searched, scanned, probed, ensorcelled and still might try to kill her? To lose her beauty while thousands of miles from her Love, from Voldemort?</p><p>What the hell was the end-game now? The war just kept going on and on and on. Right now, there was some Chechnyan wizard named Shamil the Old who was leading his six home-schooled children in stiffening Chechen and Ingush fighters in attacking her flank around Kurchaloy, and probably thousands of stupid Muggles were dying but unless she sent some more young purebloods over there to fight them—who might easily die, further reducing their numbers—her forces would be driven back and she'd have to intervene.</p><p>What was the point? Bellatrix started cackling. <em>The point is, there is no end-game, and there never will be. </em>Bellatrix had finally figured it out, and between that and the punishment she had received for failing to stop the loss of the sword all those years before, she found her belief in Voldemort more hollow than it had ever been. In Azkaban, she at least had faith of his return. Now, there was faith in… What? Nothing. She had figured it out: Voldemort very much intended for there to never be an endgame. He intended to live forever, sure. He did <em>not </em>have a plan to end the war, though; the sum of all his plans now was to 'live forever', nothing more and nothing less. The problem was that so far, there was no known way in British wizarding to live forever. It was one of those tricky things which magic tended to recoil from as too far outside of the rules of the way of the Fae.</p><p>But Russian wizarding, buried in its past, very much did have a way to live forever. And it was driving Bellatrix further into madness with envy, because it would work on only one of them, and Voldemort had sent her to retrieve it for him.</p><p>The military campaign was incidental. Bellatrix Lestrange was heading to the Caucasus to find and retrieve for Voldemort nothing less than the Wand of Koschei the Deathless.</p><p>But when Voldemort lived forever, and when Voldemort had conquered the world, and when Voldemort had the Wand of Koschei the Deathless, when Bellatrix was dead from old age with the twenty best years of her life left… When it was just Voldemort and Delphini, what would he do to her daughter? Would he start to see his own daughter as a rival?</p><p>In the part of Bellatrix's mind that was sane enough to love the child of her own body, she increasingly thought that was going to be the case. The mad part of her, conversely, grew increasingly envious the longer she thought about Koschei the Deathless. She was being asked to give immortality to her lover while she aged and died, even as he grew more reclusive, even more psychotic, as the resisting muggles and Wizards proved perfectly willing to do things like set off a nuclear weapon in Edinburgh and accept all the consequent collateral fatalities among their own precious muggles for a failed shot to kill him. <em>That </em>was the Endgame? And her sisters were <em>On the Other Side? </em>What psychotic trick of fate was that!?</p><p>"Madame Lestrange, may you live forever!" One of her Janissary commanders paused at the door, behind the screen which protected her modesty, like she gave a shit about it.</p><p>"Go ahead, Jorge." The salutation that Voldemort had the Janissaries use with Wizards made her soul clench down and grimace: She very much did want to live forever, and she very much wasn't going to get the chance to.</p><p>"The fourth division is in position. We're ready to begin the push on Vladikavkaz."</p><p>Bellatrix smirked. She at least had a moment of pleasure at <em>that. </em>The Confederation of Independent States forces—the wartime coordinating government under the Muggle Leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, but really controlled by the Koldovstoretsy (there was no way Muggles could have organised this war so effectively as to fight Voldemort's forces to a standstill)-were doubtless expecting her to hit the Iron Gates of Derbent as hard as she could with the Janissaries and slog through the radioactive hell around Baku rather than try to advance through the dubious terrain of the central Caucasus and the legendary Chechen insurgents.</p><p>She wasn't a fucking idiot. She was going to advance on Vladikavkaz, deal with Shamil and his sons, annihilate the Muggle population of Chechnya and Ingushetia and seize the Georgian Military Road over the Jvari Pass. Bellatrix had never expected <em>this </em>to be her reward for her twenty years in Azkaban, but she was Bellatrix Lestrange, the greatest Witch of her generation. Muggles would not better her at <em>anything, </em>not even this war which was increasingly fought on their terms.</p><p>"I'll be out in a few minutes, Jorge."</p><p>"May you live forever!" He saluted and spun on heel to step out.</p><p><em>May you live forever… </em>She looked down at the scars on her wrists from Azkaban, and in a secret, hidden part of her mind, thought very bad thoughts, and wished for the killing to begin, and cursed that Grozny was a city already ruined by the Muggles, so she couldn't do the job herself. Still, there were people there, and that would be enough; it would quiet the Screams, for a while.</p><p>For only a while.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>
  <b>Port of Alat, Azerbaijani Coast of the Caspian Sea</b>
</p><p> </p><p>When they arrived at Alat, the full squadron had come back together over the night after proceeding independently. Four big rail ferries, two lorry ferries, and four cargo ships had been escorted by the <em>Tatarstan </em>and two smaller <em>Koni-</em>class frigates, which now sailed on patrol lines off to the east from Gil Island. The smoke rising into the air in the north from Baku was eerie, and occasionally flicked with flames on the horizon to the north-northeast. Two rail ferries and a lorry ferry went in first, as well as the freighters, which were be unloaded at the same time; the ferries would unload faster, but there were fewer specialized docks for them, so they had to unload in two waves. That meant the total unloading process for the ferries and the freighters would take approximately the same length of time.</p><p>This focus on operational logistics was a new part of Hermione’s life. She had always been an intellectual. She had managed to complete six months of infantry officer training and another six months of special training at the Combined Arms Academy over the past four years in rotations back from the front. She carried pocket copies of Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Renatus, and the <em>Strategikon</em> of Maurice, and her Field Manual of Arms was dog-eared. To keep weight down, for comfort she only had Aurelius' <em>Meditations. </em> For magical books, she had Trimble, <em>Basic Hexes for the Busy and Vexed, The Dark Arts Outsmarted, Practical Defensive Magic and its Use Against the Dark Arts</em> , and <em>Self-Defensive Spellwork</em>. Keeping the books down to a bare minimum, they still filled half of her regulation duffel. Ginny had more wizarding books, of course, and Larissa had Russian ones, and they all shared to keep their knowledge up.</p><p><em>They can pry the books from me when I die. </em> It was one source of great pride in the life that she still had. In front of her, the unloading continued. Each of the ferries was designed to carry forty railway wagons. They had been loaded directly with the tank transporters which had carried their T-64s all the way from Gansu for redeployment, with the bogies being swapped at Shankou for the break in gauge. And so in a journey of weeks across thousands of kilometres of the Central Asian desert, the 27 <sup> th </sup> Guards Motor-Rifle Division was heading to the Kavkaz, with several Turkmen armoured regiments reinforcing them. Frankly, war had gotten more interesting when she realised it involved lots of books and maths and railway timetables and sheer scientific complexity.</p><p>Ginny came up to her side with a grin. “Larissa said we could go ashore early, if you like. I brought some chicken from the galley.”</p><p>Ginny’s arrival barely stopped Hermione from habitually going for a cigarette. “Ginny, we’re not docked yet. We’re waiting our turn for a quay.”</p><p>“Wind’s blowing the right way, so…” Ginny cast <em>Arresto Momentum </em>as she pushed them off the rail. Hermione <em>hated </em>using that spell after it barely saved her, but in this case it worked perfectly, and gave the time for the wind to push them down onto the eastern quay. Some of the soldiers on the rail applauded, and Ginny gave a little bow in response. She was still very happy for male attention, though she hadn’t dated anyone at all since Harry.</p><p>Years ago that would have upset Hermione enormously. Now, she had figured out Ginny was going to do it, and had just rolled with it. Ginny’s fierce independence had become even more paramount to her state of being since the hardship of the past years. Since members of her family had started to die in this.</p><p>Hermione flipped her duffel over her shoulder and adjusted her helmet. “So, now we find somewhere to have lunch?”</p><p>“Exactly!” Ginny started off with Hermione, stepping off the quay onto the brown sand and rock of the shore. But they hadn’t gotten far across the barren hills, salt ponds and toward the ramshackle village before they both realised that what was beyond it was not some storage depot or ammunition dump, but a refugee camp. The smell had been the first warning.</p><p>“Oh…” Ginny sighed as she looked out, and saw a group of children run up toward them.</p><p>“əsgəri!” they cried, which Hermione figured meant ‘soldier’ well enough. She could see the rags they were dressed in, and how thin they were, and how it made Ginny want to cry.</p><p>But while Food cannot be Created—that was one of the fundamental laws—it could be <em>duplicated, </em>though it would not be as nutritious and would rot immediately. But that didn’t matter; it would be consumed even faster. The two women looked at each other and without further thought pulled out their lunches of chicken and rice and their wands. It wouldn’t help beyond today, it wouldn’t help beyond this one meal, but for one meal, the children would eat.</p><p>The screams of delight and awe as more and more people from the refugee camp clustered to witness Hermione and Ginny recreate the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes with a little bit of wizarding power were enough to make even Hermione smile. More and more people kept coming until they had almost exhausted Hermione and Ginny, and the two, in exhausted contentment, accepted tea from a lean man with blisters on his face, dressed in the rags of fine clothes.</p><p>“Wonder-workers,” he said, speaking in Russian, which might as well be the <em>lingua franca </em>of the region in the circumstances. “Thank you for helping the children. Allah protect you.”</p><p>“Witches,” Ginny replied with a smile. “Glad to help.”</p><p>The man laughed. “We would not think that word good, but if you say you are witch, then witches are good.”</p><p>“Thank you,” Hermione said softly. “Were you all from Baku?”</p><p>“We are Baku,” he said with some grim pride. “I just came back from a tour.”</p><p>“I thought that Baku was uninhabitable?” Ginny asked in consternation.</p><p>He laughed bitterly. “It is. That’s why we live in the Sychlijar Camp. But we men do three month rotations at the oil fields and the refineries, to keep the petrol flowing for your ships and trains and tanks and fight the fires.” His lean face sank. “We lose a thousand a month to radiation and industrial accidents.”</p><p>“I shouldn’t have asked…” Ginny trailed off, and turned her attention to the children.</p><p>But Hermione looked to the man. “We’re all soldiers, now,” she offered quietly. “All doing our bit to stop Voldemort.”</p><p>The man spat at the sound of the name. “Shaitan himself.”</p><p>“You’re right about that. Want a smoke?” She offered, trying to be friendly.</p><p>“I cough whenever I smoke now,” he grinned blackly. “Not much longer now for me. But every barrel of fuel our towers crack is another step to victory.”</p><p>Hermione turned away and looked down. She imagined the man, choking on the radioactive soot and smoke in Baku, working to keep one of the damaged Cracking Towers at a refinery running. It was the scientific alchemy of Hell. She tried to remember what could be said as a benediction for a Muslim. “Go with God,” she offered.</p><p>“<em>Tawakkaltu Ala-Allah,” </em>the Azerbaijani man offered in return in liturgical Arabic, and then he turned quietly away, to watch the children who for one meal had full bellies, and smile.</p><p>As he did, a rumbling cut through the ground. Hermione and Ginny tensed with the reflexes of veterans. Then, coming around a curve, they saw a locomotive swinging down the embankment on the broad-gauge line from Baku. A massive Red Star surmounted the armoured snout as a wisp of soot from the exhaust stack indicated this engine was in better condition than most, despite the massive welded slabs of steel down the side.</p><p>Despite everything, Hermione’s heart caught in her chest and she leapt up in excitement. It was an <em>armoured train, </em>and a real one too, purpose-built, not improvised. With the airbrakes hissing and popping, it slowed to a stop on the main-line, Russian flags flying overhead, and Red Stars painted on it for recognition markings.</p><p>“Ginny, that’s an armoured train. A <em>Russian </em>one, so it retreated from the North. You don’t think…?”</p><p>“Well, they should at least know!” Both of them made haste, hoping against hope.</p><p>And for once, in the middle of uncertainty, death, starvation, combat, a little, tiny dream came true.</p><p>An absurd figure wearing a green skirt and a Cossack’s blouse, a cherkeska, with blonde hair in a braid and a massive pair of smoke-tinted tanker’s goggles, with a sword buckled to her side and her rifle on her shoulder with roses stuffed in the barrel, descended from the train with an eager shout of her own. A massive burly Tajik man with a full black beard followed her with a Papasha submachinegun in hand, with a trace of concern evident through his beard.</p><p>“HERMIONE! GINNY!”</p><p>Hermione shouted right back. “LUNA! I was so worried when I heard that they took Makhachkala!”</p><p>Luna Lovegood reached out and spun into an embrace with Hermione Granger, still wearing those giant tankers' goggles. “We were attacked with armour-piercers,” she said in exaggerated excitement. “By <em>Janissaries.</em> But I used <em>Impedimenta</em> on their <em>auto-loaders, </em> and six of their tanks blew up and we <em>got away</em> ! And then I was given tea and we stopped and we found these flowers, but they’re getting sort of dry, so I fixed them.” Closer in, Hermione could see that instead of fake musket cartridges or <em>gazyr, </em>the blouse held potion bottles. Leave it to Luna to come up with something so clever. Hermione immediately wanted one.</p><p>“By Merlin, Luna, did you have to retreat through <em>Baku?” </em>Ginny asked delicately, still feeling a little sick over the conversations with the man.</p><p>“Oh no, there’s a railway to the west of Baku, and that’s the way we came,” Luna answered, and peeled off from Hermione to give Ginny a big hug, too. “I LOVE Armoured Trains. They’re so neat, and so rare, but everyone likes them! They’re like the Crumple-Horned Snorkack of the Military World,” she said, like she was confiding a very important secret.</p><p>Hermione shook her head, and looked at the man who was obviously Luna Lovegood’s muggle bodyguard. He looked back.</p><p>“You’re friends of her’s?” He asked.</p><p>“Yes. Schoolmates.”</p><p>He nodded. “She’s happy to see you,” he added laconically. “I’m Farrukh, so she calls me ‘happy’.”</p><p>Hermione shook her head. “Want a smoke, Farrukh?”</p><p>“Sure.”</p><p>Hermione gave him a Belomor and a light. “She is something else, isn’t she?” She gestured to Luna, while the woman talked to Ginny.</p><p>Farrukh took a drag on his cigarette and looked very, very serious toward Hermione. “She is a Mad Fakhira, and it is well-known that Allah protects the Mad. I would rather be at her side than anywhere else in this war.”</p><p><em>I’ve found someone who takes Luna seriously. </em>Hermione blinked, and took a drag on the cigarette she’d lit up, herself. Shaking her head, she looked down to where the unloading of the freighters was continuing. The cranes on the quay were lifting artillery pieces and pallets of ammunition off, and setting them down on railway wagons. Large numbers of men, who she now realised were from the refugee camp, were securing them to the wagons with chains.</p><p>Hermione saw some movement, and jerked her head around to see a column of four UAZ-469’s approaching. In one of the middle ones was a woman in a uniform like her own service uniform in the MKPФ (министерство колдовства Российской Федерации), the Ministry of Witchcraft of the Russian Federation. But with the massive number of stars on her epaulettes, Hermione realised in surprise that she must be the Actual State Councillor of the Azerbaijani Ministry. Her hair was grey, her expression severe, as she dismounted when the UAZ screeched to a halt.</p><p>“Junior Councillor of Witchcraft Granger?” She asked. It was the equivalent of being an Army Major, so that was normally what her comrades called her in the field for convenience. But the Actual State Councillor for Azerbaijan was not exactly a comrade.</p><p>“Ma’am!” Hermione dropped the cigarette, came to attention and saluted.</p><p>“Good to meet you in person. I am Nuray Hajinsky, the Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Go ahead and smoke, Junior Councillor.”</p><p>Hermione sheepishly retrieved it. Even cigarettes were too precious to waste these days. “You wanted to talk with me?”</p><p>“Well, first I want this armoured train off the mainline!”</p><p>Luna looked sheepishly at the woman as her voice picked up. “Oh right.” She gave Ginny a last hug. “Sorry, Hermione!” And ran back for the train.</p><p>Hermione shielded her eyes. “Sorry, ma’am.”</p><p>“No worries. Walk with me, Junior Councillor. You were told about the reason we’re being reinforced here in the Kavkaz?”</p><p>“Yes, General Pronichev told me in some detail, Ma’am.”</p><p>“Well, good, but we’ve got a problem,” State Councillor Hajinsky murmured. “We thought that they would attack the Iron Gates again, so we were planning on reinforcing Derbent. Good enough to stop Gog and Magog, good enough stop Hitler, good enough to stop Yaxley—good enough to stop Bellatrix Lestrange.”</p><p>“She jinked back west again, didn’t she?”</p><p>“Exactly. Her Janissary divisions started moving out for Grozny this morning. That means she’s going to try and force the Jvari Pass. With winter coming on. It sounds insane, but remember that Bellatrix was the Death Eater who led her troops over the Simplon Pass in winter to conquer Italy.”</p><p>Hermione grimaced. “Still, that puts them far away from the oil.” She shook her head. “I suppose the Georgian Military Road,” she tried to keep her geography straight, “goes right into Tbilisi, doesn’t it?”</p><p>“It does, but Tbilisi was hit by three nuclear weapons. It’s not really so important. There’s another one of you English who is working on a lead. The 27<sup>th</sup> will pass through Tbilisi—the railway has been repaired--and start to deploy at Dzegvi. You’ll meet your contact there.”</p><p>“Do you know who it is?” Hermione answered.</p><p>“I’m afraid not,” the older woman replied. “Well, I was also asked to give you something else,” she added, and fishing in her pocket, produced a scroll that she handed to Hermione. “Moskva MinKol asked me to present this to you,” she finished with a flourish, using the common abbreviation for the Ministry of Witchcraft in Russian.</p><p>Hermione unfolded it, and the enchanted scroll played a short ditty of the opening chords to the famous military song <em>V ‘Put, </em> “Let’s Go”. As it did, the State Seal of the Ministry of Witchcraft glowed in red, white and blue above the paper. <em>By Order of Georgii Borisovich Sorokin, </em> <em>Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft, </em> <em>Hermione </em> <em>Alanovna</em> <em> Granger is hereby promoted to the rank of Councillor of Witchcraft </em> <em>for the Russian Federation.</em></p><p>Alan was not her father’s real name, of course. But she needed a patronymic, and the further it threw off the Death-Eaters, the better. She had no idea if her parents were still alive, but…</p><p>Between actually being able to help the children, however briefly, and thinking about her parents, Hermione felt wet hot tears splash on her cheeks without ever really feeling any of the other sensations of crying. “Thank you, ma’am.”</p><p>The elder Azerbaijani witch put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re going to finish the job,” she offered, with an iron reservoir of confidence. “There <em>will </em>be a future for humanity and wizarding kind. And starting a counteroffensive with Bellatrix Lestrange’s head on a pike would be a nice gesture to Voldemort back in London. I have ever confidence in you, my child. Present your wand to the enemy, and show no mercy.”</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>Outskirts of Grozny, Chechen Republic, Occupied Russian Federation</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix had Apparated to Gudermes on the eastern approach to Grozny as her Janissary divisions fronted a mass of ensorcelled troops and monsters driving toward the already-ruined city. The Chally II’s which equipped the elite Janissary units were on the advance, still being mass-produced in the largely intact United Kingdom with their superb Chobham Armour, were like so much chaff to Bellatrix’s interests, but her lower-ranking wizards, the Pureblood Wannabes who aspired to becoming Death Eaters themselves, could be relied upon to enchant the precious vehicles for additional protection, or else.</p><p>She knew that they really needed to seize the railway intact, or else they’d have problems. It was the only real way the muggles had for moving large quantities of goods across land, and muggle armies needed large quantities of goods. <em> Her </em> Army needed large quantities of goods. <em> Her </em> Army was a damned <em> muggle </em>Army.</p><p>And if she wanted to win, and live, she was damned well going to fight like one. Because she was not going to give up yet. She still had a life to live. She still had Delphini. And <em> fucking muggles </em>wouldn’t be the reason that Voldemort killed her. If he was going to do that, she was going to give him a better reason.</p><p>So she was going to break through the ruins of Grozny in record time. The shells were laid out in front of her, with Green Crosses on them, a peculiar design. Men in the janissaries were muttering softly, and making sure it was slaves and captives who positioned them. Muggle items could be enchanted—cars could be made to fly, tanks could be made resistant to magic, too—but weapons rarely were. Either it was a magical weapon, or it was a muggle weapon. There was no particular spell that would make a shell more lethal.</p><p>Except when the shell was empty, and custom designed merely as a dispenser for a very muggle kind of potion. <em> They really are remarkable at finding new ways to kill each other, </em>Bellatrix thought as she walked along the lines of gas shells, and the slaves worked at the delicate process of loading her potion from a great iron vat into them.</p><p>It was then that she paused, hearing screams from some of the houses nearby. The high-pitched shouts froze her in place. For all they were coming from muggle animals, at the hands of muggle animals, they sounded altogether very much like her <em> own. </em></p><p>Ignoring the work, Bellatrix was frozen in place. She didn’t know where to begin, as the memories hammered her. The memories that she would never let anyone see, <em> anyone. </em>Not with Legilimency, not with anything. The memories that were the reason for the promise Voldemort had given her. The promise that he had betrayed over the Sword. A betrayal which had come with beautiful Delphini, a betrayal which meant she was nothing more than another Death Eater.</p><p>A betrayal that meant she could trust no-one at all.</p><p>She was frozen in place, but it didn’t really matter at all, because the men were still working. Her Janissaries and her slaves were still working, and they would keep working until she told them to stop. They certainly knew better, even the officers, than to disturb her, or question her, or care if she was in a reverie, or even using some kind of magic to prepare to face the enemy. One did not question a Death Eater when one was a muggle, and expect to live. One obeyed, or one perished, no matter how ‘important’ of a muggle that one was.</p><p>It was for that reason that she did not think twice when the moment seized her. “Jorge!” she called out to her Chief of Staff. “I want you to have the soldiers let those women go.”</p><p>“May You Live Forever, Madame,” he answered with a salute and stepped forward, rubbing a gloved hand over his short-cropped sandy-brown hair. “Madame, the men…”</p><p>“Obey,” Bellatrix answered flatly. She very nearly killed him then and there, except that then she would have to go find someone else with the authority to order the soldiers to stop. And he was a Janissary Officer, valued, at least. So the eldest Black daughter deigned to provide an explanation. “They are distracting me, but there is no value in shooting them, we need slaves in this region and the men always fight to the death. So I want you to make the men stop, and I want you to let them go.”</p><p>Jorge stiffened. “It will lower morale before the action. Do you have a recommendation, Madame?”</p><p>“We are still on our supply lines, and I suspect there will be sustained action so there will be little opportunity for Firewhisky, so distribute a double-ration to the men before the attack in order to encourage them,” Bellatrix snapped. “Now execute your instructions.”</p><p>“May You Live Forever, Madame!”</p><p>He turned back to the Command Track that they had brought up for her. Muggles and subordinates handled most of the coordination, but Bellatrix was aware that she had to make sure that the general intent of her orders was followed, otherwise some fucking idiot would lead an entire division of ensorcelled supporting troops into a swamp and humiliate her before the Dark Lord. The assault on Jvari Pass was a precision, high-speed operation in which hours counted. She had to lead it in person.</p><p>But what she was actually interested in was enchanting the potions in person. That was <em> Wizarding </em>work, unlike leading the Army. The brief confrontation with Jorge had disrupted her concentration. That made the Screams fade away, and that was not a bad thing. The screams in the buildings were fading away as well, as the order spread. There was a part of her that was still very uncomfortable when confronted with reminders of her upbringing in the lives and fates of muggles.</p><p>It made it seem like they were almost people. That wasn’t upsetting, but it was unsettling, like the first time you pulled up a Mandrake and it seemed almost sapient. <em> That’s it. </em></p><p>She smiled, baring her rotted, wrecked teeth to a world which, in this time and place, did not care in the slightest. The nearest enemy position was about fifteen kilometres ahead in Argun, and Grozny, less than thirty-two kilometres away, could be hit by her artillery with ease. She just had to finish the work on preparing the potion for the shells…</p><p>The radio clipped to her belt crackled. “Madame, incoming 2 o’clock high!”</p><p>Bellatrix lurched up and without thinking flipped her wand up and cast <em> Protego, </em>in the variation she had specialised for these occasions.</p><p>It saved her, her command track, Jorge, the shells they were working on, and her potions from the tracks of cluster bombs, as a group of <em> shapes </em>tore through the sky above her. The terrifying roar of attack jets going supersonic at low altitude came seconds later as flares, chaff and decoys tore out from the aircraft.</p><p>Bombs ricocheted off her <em> Protego </em> in random wild directions, hitting some of the artillery pieces—but they had plenty—and knocking out a few tanks. They skipped randomly into houses in the city, too, and the explosions would be followed by screams soon enough. But not <em>her</em> screams.</p><p>Bellatrix knew how this game was played by the muggles. Instead of following up on the temptation to cast a spell against the fleeing jets, she raised <em> Protego </em> again. That saved her from the <em> second </em>wave, intended to take advantage of any wizards who had committed the amateur hour mistake of destroying the jets that were no longer threats and dropping their shields to do so. A second wave of bombs ricocheted crazily through the town in consequence to their interaction with the magical shield.</p><p>A smirked touched her lips as her Chief of Staff stepped back over to her side. “What were they, Jorge?”</p><p>“Fencers, at maybe fifty meters,” he answered with a shrug. “Harassment attack.” It was a pretty common game now. If the Wizards tried to kill the bombers, one of them might just fuck up and die. It happened more than Bellatrix would like to admit. “The Rapier SAMs with the 3<sup>rd</sup> Janissary Division are engaging now, Madame. We might get a few.”</p><p>Bellatrix ignored the comment, that was more relevant to Jorge than to her. There were screams in the city from wounded muggles, but they were not <em>her </em>Screams. She fixed on the fact that the muggles had killed and wounded their own kind in a <em>failed </em>attempt to kill Wizards, and let it soak into her tortured soul. It kept the madness comfortably at bay.</p><p>She wondered, idly, if the muggles had evacuated their civilians from Grozny.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Notes (continued in the notes section):</p><p>Turkmenbashi - The largest port on the Caspian coast of Turkmenistan, it was renamed from Krasnovodsk by the regime of The Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan's post-Soviet dictator.<br/>
Cartridge start - Some diesel engines, and actually not just in Russia, are actually compression started by setting off the powder charge from a bullet, without the bullet of course. This is called a cartridge.<br/>
papirosa - this is an extremely strong, unfiltered, primitive cigarette with the end you smoke surrounded by a cardboard tube that you pinch in your fingers to hold and smoke from. The Belomorkanals that Hermione is smoking are a real brand, named after Stalin's massive construction effort of the White Sea Canal (which after all is what Belomorkanal means) in the 1930s. They are cheap and strong and represent exactly what a soldier would smoke.<br/>
Makhachkala - City on the northeast of the Caucasus on the Caspian shore.<br/>
Alat - A small port with rail access south of Baku.<br/>
AKM - Used for the AK-47M and AK-74M (referring to the second in this case), basically simplified and improved variants of those assault rifles.<br/>
papakha - a kind of hat cossacks wear, furry with sheep's wool<br/>
bakelite - Plastic-like material you'd see cigarette trays made out of in the 60s.<br/>
lezginka - A kind of dance.<br/>
"Registered Cossack of the Orenburg Host" - this is a legal term and a cultural term. Legally, "Registered Cossack" means someone who is in one of the Cossack hosts recognised for paramilitary duties by the government of Russia. It also means a certain mannerism, style of address, and lifestyle, and group affiliation. But each host also has uniforms which means for purposes of concealment, someone might be wearing one even when they don't belong to this group - if it's convenient and they're important. In the old days of the Empire, aristocrats might have several regiments they were affiliated with and have a uniform for each one<br/>
Vashe Blagorodie, Gospoda Udacha - Your Honour, Lady Luck - a famous song from the iconic Soviet movie "White Sun of the Desert".<br/>
Naftalan crude - a kind of crude oil from the Caucasus region that people bathe in because of its reputed healing powers.<br/>
Janissaries - Ottoman slave-soldiers who were raised from a young age for military service and were the Ottoman Empire's elite soldiers. The term here is used to refer to muggle troops who volunteered to serve Voldemort, mostly because the Death Eaters don't care what they're called and because they adopted it out of pride when their enemies (i.e., the CIS and allies) started calling them that. Russia has a long cultural history of fighting Janissaries.<br/>
Koldovstoretsy - This just means "People of Koldovstoretz", i.e., Witches and Wizards in the CIS.<br/>
Jvari Pass / Georgian Military Road - this refers to a famous route constructed by the Russian Army to access Tbilisi from the city of Vladikavkaz across the Caucasus mountains. It's quite rugged going, but at the end of the day, it is just a road. "Military Road" is just part of the name because it was built by the old Imperial Army.<br/>
Tatarstan -- The name of a Russian Navy surface action ship of slightly less than 2,000 tons full load displacement, around 102 metres in length. Armed with anti-ship and anti-air missiles, in 2002 it is the flagship of the Caspian Flotilla.<br/>
T-64 -- The front-line Main Battle Tank of the Soviet Ground Forces during the 1960s - 1970s and in service to the present; it saw heavy action in the Donbass, and is unique due to the automatic loading cannon, three-man crew, and very high ground speed.<br/>
Kavkaz -- Transliteration from Russian of Caucasus.<br/>
27th Guards Motor-Rifle Division -- the formation Hermione is attached to  -- this is the equivalent of a mechanized division in the west.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>References:<br/>Turkmenbashi -- The largest port on the Caspian coast of Turkmenistan, it was renamed from Krasnovodsk by the regime of The Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan's post-Soviet dictator.<br/>Cartridge start -- Some diesel engines, and actually not just in Russia, are actually compression started by setting off the powder charge from a bullet, without the bullet of course. This is called a cartridge.<br/>papirosa -- this is an extremely strong, unfiltered, primitive cigarette with the end you smoke surrounded by a cardboard tube that you pinch in your fingers to hold and smoke from. The Belomorkanals that Hermione is smoking are a real brand, named after Stalin's massive construction effort of the White Sea Canal (which after all is what Belomorkanal means) in the 1930s. They are cheap and strong and represent exactly what a soldier would smoke.<br/>Makhachkala -- City on the northeast of the Caucasus on the Caspian shore.<br/>Alat -- A small port with rail access south of Baku.<br/>AKM -- Used for the AK-47M and AK-74M (referring to the second in this case), basically simplified and improved variants of those assault rifles.<br/>papakha -- a kind of hat cossacks wear, furry with sheep's wool<br/>bakelite -- Plastic-like material you'd see cigarette trays made out of in the 60s.<br/>lezginka -- A kind of dance.<br/>"Registered Cossack of the Orenburg Host" -- this is a legal term and a cultural term. Legally, "Registered Cossack" means someone who is in one of the Cossack hosts recognised for paramilitary duties by the government of Russia. It also means a certain mannerism, style of address, and lifestyle, and group affiliation. But each host also has uniforms which means for purposes of concealment, someone might be wearing one even when they don't belong to this group -- if it's convenient and they're important. In the old days of the Empire, aristocrats might have several regiments they were affiliated with and have a uniform for each one.<br/>Vashe Blagorodie, Gospoda Udacha -- Your Honour, Lady Luck -- a famous song from the iconic Soviet movie "White Sun of the Desert".<br/>Naftalan crude -- a kind of crude oil from the Caucasus region that people bathe in because of its reputed healing powers.<br/>Janissaries -- Ottoman slave-soldiers who were raised from a young age for military service and were the Ottoman Empire's elite soldiers. The term here is used to refer to muggle troops who volunteered to serve Voldemort, mostly because the Death Eaters don't care what they're called and because they adopted it out of pride when their enemies (i.e., the CIS and allies) started calling them that. Russia has a long cultural history of fighting Janissaries.<br/>Koldovstoretsy -- This just means "People of Koldovstoretz", i.e., Witches and Wizards in the CIS.<br/>Jvari Pass / Georgian Military Road --- this refers to a famous route constructed by the Russian Army to access Tbilisi from the city of Vladikavkaz across the Caucasus mountains. It's quite rugged going, but at the end of the day, it is just a road. "Military Road" is just part of the name because it was built by the old Imperial Army.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Hope Eternal</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Chapter Three: Hope Eternal</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>The mainline from Alat to Poti had been cleared of all traffic so that the trains carrying the 27<sup> th </sup> Division and its reinforcements could make time toward the west. They were packed into the cars, with men folded into the bunks of hard sleepers, and others lining the benches, and in some of the coaches, packed in like sardines on the benches in the compartments. To get some space for reading in, Hermione was squatting with her back against the cold steel in the vestibule between two cars, with only two guys there who were using the semi-open space to use a propane burner to boil water for tea. The disadvantage was the cold and the roar of the train as they slammed their way over the jointed rail at speed. Running as multiple sections on the same timetable, she could hear the howl of the train’s horn, and occasionally an old automobile that had been converted to be hauled by horses or donkeys could be seen waiting at a level crossing in a flash through the gaps in the vestibule. It was a very long way from Hogwarts Express.</p><p>They had passed through the city of Ganja, which hadn’t been nuked, a while ago. It had been reassuring to see the marshalling yard intact, filled with trains held to allow them to pass with their extra flags rigged as the big electrics screamed. The catenary was intact from Alat to Rustavi, across the border in Georgia, and somehow they found power for it—probably at the expense of lights for homes. They were slowing down now, and Larissa came into the vestibule, just in time for the two soldiers to be finished brewing their tea.</p><p>“A brew for comrade witch?” She asked jovially, unslipping the tin cup from the chain on her backpack. Hermione had already been promised a cup, of course, and the words had the desired effect, as the men went back to their unit with the rest of the pot, and for the moment left the two witches alone in the vestibule.</p><p>“Rustavi?” Hermione asked casually. If her hands hadn’t been so cold from the weather, then it would have been intolerable to hold the cup of boiling black tea.</p><p>“Yes, they’re going to change out the engines, and then give us the order to don our OZKs,” Larissa answered, dropping down and cupping her gloved hands around her tea cup. “Call it about an hour.”</p><p>Hermione grimaced. CBRN gear was a special kind of nightmare for the troops. “Do we have to run right through the city?”</p><p>“No, they finished a bypass, but it’s all temporary track and relayings… The old city marshalling yard is a groundburst crater, so it would be hard to use that route,” Larissa laughed darkly. Both of them, though, were a little nervous.</p><p>There were no known spells that would protect against radiation. Oh, you could could cast the Bubble-Head Charm, and then you were safe from inhaling particulates, and that’s what the witches would do to get through Tbilisi—there was not enough OZK around for all the soldiers in the Armies, let alone to give it to people who had an alternative—but ionizing radiation? No, there was nothing. Shields could physically deflect nuclear weapons, and that had saved the Wizarding schools and Wizarding headquarters and wizarding families around the world that Voldemort had warned. But the Russian muggle government had used S-300s and A-35/A-135 missiles to the same effect to save Moskva and several other cities. Neither one had a way to protect against ionizing neutron radiation, except getting out of the way of it as rapidly as possible. Apparating somewhere else, however, was not possible if you <em> needed </em>to go somewhere.</p><p>Or if you needed to protect muggles who needed to travel with their equipment through a nuked out hellscape of a city. Or if you were an officer, and you needed to be an example. The two of them, Hermione was sure, were thinking the same thing as they felt the train lurch to a final halt in the hiss of air brakes and banging of couplings below their booted feet.</p><p>“One of my professors,” Larissa remarked finally, “said that he thought it was because fission is actually one of the Dark Arts, because it’s unnatural entropy. The universe is inherently upward in spiritual tendency, <em>fusion </em>is natural and can be a muggle art, but there’s something alchemical about fission, something Dark. Like it’s the moment that even a muggle can see the magical nature of reality, but only at such a small scale that they don’t appreciate what they’re seeing, and they try to rationalise it in terms of science, but here you have this one terrifying equation, E=MC<sup>2</sup>, which actually means you can do anything. Muggles just don’t appreciate that <em>C</em> is Magic. Anyway, he said that, <em>instinctually, </em>muggles can sense that fission is a crime against nature. That’s why the anti-nuclear movement was so strong.”</p><p>“I wish our professors had talked about ideas that cool at Hogwarts,” Hermione shook her head for a moment.</p><p>“I was Black Court at Koldovstoretz,” Larissa shrugged. “We had professors who pushed intellectual boundaries like that. It’s a Russian thing. I’ve noticed that you Hogwartsians were kind of…”</p><p>“Ossified,” Hermione agreed flatly. She finished her tea and clipped her cup back to her own pack. “But you’re a pureblood yourself, Larissa Sergeivna.”</p><p>“It was always different in Russia and the east, witches and warlocks married nobility without caring about it. So pure-blood doesn’t mean non-muggle to us, it means aristocratic. Someone like Voldemort would be a pure-blood in the Koldovstoretz of a hundred years ago. And then there was the revolution, and things got <em>complicated. </em>In the west, you’ve had it easy, the closest thing was what happened to Beâuxbatons in 1790, but it got fixed, you know? Life went back to the way it was before, the old blood families could return to being old blood families. In Russia it didn’t matter if your manor was charmed a thousand times over to look like a rotted, abandoned ruin, the Commissars would have blown it up and turned it into a salt mine anyway to make a point about the <em>ancien regime.</em>”</p><p>“I know how the story goes now,” Hermione answered, striking up a cigarette, and extending one to Larissa. Though she still felt that Ginny and even Luna were closer friends, there was one thing that she could do much more easily with Larissa, which was smoke and drink and act all soldierly.</p><p>“Yeah, well, that’s where Koldovstoretsy got interested in the outside world, we had to navigate the reality of both the Wizarding world agreements and the very real problem of the Soviet Power, and all of these new muggle-born wizards showing up who believed in it, while families like mine … Adapted. Or didn’t, in the case of the Karkarovtsy.”</p><p>The term made Hermione think of Professor Karkaroff. “His family fled Russia with the revolution?”</p><p>“Yes, exactly, that’s why Durmstrang ended up with so many Slavs in it. They were the ones who refused the settlement with the Soviet Power,” Larissa noted, and took a drag on her cigarette. “The Internal Passport days were weird for wizards. Of course, we now we have them again, but it doesn’t matter, just wear your uniform, it’s wartime and everyone knows now.”</p><p>“Yeah.” Hermione saw two old Mashkas, M62 diesels, trundle by, smoking like usual. Like she was.</p><p>“Not much longer,” Larissa pushed her braid back behind her. “We should go inside one of the coaches, the radiation levels will be lower with another two doors between us and Tbilisi.”</p><p>“What’s the point?”</p><p>“Yeah, you keep talking like you’re not ever going to have another man in your life, so I guess you don’t care if you take a dose of rads,” Larissa snorted. “Come on, Hermione Alanovna. It does matter.”</p><p>“No it <em>doesn’t,</em>” Hermione answered, and she felt impetuous and rebellious. “I’m <em>not </em>having a family. I’ve never even slept with a man and I don’t intend to start.”</p><p>“Wait, you and Ron..?” Larissa asked in shock, for once not using Ron's Russian <em>nom de guerre. </em></p><p>“Never had sex,” Hermione affirmed. “I don’t know, maybe we would have. The wizarding world isn’t much for queer people, it seems sometimes.” She levelled a flat glance at her friend. “Neither is Russia.”</p><p>Larissa stared at her friend with those sharp, clear blue eyes, brushed at her dark braid, and took another drag of her cigarette. “I’ve got other things to give a fuck about. You’re my friend, Hermione.”</p><p>“Thanks.” Hermione actually smiled behind her cigarette. That had gone a lot better than she was fearing. “I don’t really know when I realised it, making that time everyone was hooking up in Alma-Ata, and I… Just couldn’t. But it was after I broke up with Ron. That really was about Chisinau.”</p><p>“You’re too good for this world, Hermione,” Larissa shook her head. “Well, fuck that, even if nobody else shows up I’ll be at your wedding when you find that special lady and get a priest drunk enough to do the rites.” She grinned slyly, and leapt to her feet. “But only if you get inside the damned compartment.”</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Tbilisi had been like a nightmare. Wending their way along the temporary bypass, with a cribwork of wooden trestles supporting it in many places and salvaged rail, they had been able to look down on the hellscape of the ruined city. Hermione couldn’t get it out of her head that she had been gawking at the grave of three-quarters of a million people, who they mostly hadn’t even bothered to bury. It would have been much, much worse if she hadn’t seen the similar visage of a ruined city several times before in several other places around Eurasia. They were sitting in one of the coaches across from Alexandra Rostislavna, with the Major sometimes idly looking at her watch.</p><p>The other part of the distraction, though, was the endless clicking of the radiation detector, sounding like a scrolling, broken radio. Ginny, sitting a few rows down, got up to look at it, a gauzy bubble adhering to her upper body as was the case with all the Witches. “It says three-point-six,” she said. “How bad is that?"</p><p>Alexandra seemed to get a baleful look from the flash of her eyes—it was impossible to see more through the mask—and reached behind her to tug on her CBRN Officer’s collar. They exchanged notes in an awkward rush of writing with cut-down pencils on scraps of paper, and then she looked back to Ginny. “Don’t worry, Captain,” she said calmly, using Ginny’s equivalent military rank, “that’s just a chest x-ray.”</p><p>Hermione leaned over to Larissa and whispered, too. “Alexandra’s lying, isn’t she?”</p><p>“No, she isn’t lying,” Larissa answered delicately. “That <em>is </em>just a chest x-ray. But it’s also as high as the dosimeter goes.”</p><p>“Why the hell is this one worse than the other ones?”</p><p>“There used to be a nuclear materials research facility in Tbilisi,” Larissa answered. “Anyway, don’t worry, it’s not that bad. They run trains through here all the time.”</p><p>Hermione nodded, and grinned, a death’s head grin. There was no point in telling Ginny. Ginny wanted a family, and she’d probably still have one. They were breathing pure, radiation-free air. There was nothing going in their lungs, they had their Bubble-Head Charms. Everyone around them was in a gas mask, which should be doing the same thing. Whatever was in the black hole to hell of the former radiation research institution, it was far from them. There was no sense in worrying her unduly. There was only one thing to do, really. She sat back and started reading her book again until the all-clear was sounded when they reached Mtskheta, where the outside of the trains was hosed down by water.</p><p>As they dissipated their bubbles and the muggle troops were doffing their masks, running the muggle version of a "wand", a dosimeter, over the troops, and disposing of the cartridges in sealed bags, Ginny breathed an audible sigh of relief.</p><p>Hermione just reached into her pocket and pulled out her pack and got another belomor.</p><p>Larissa had one of the biggest grins on her face that Hermione had ever seen as she reached for her own. “Sometimes, I wonder about you English, but now I think you understand.”</p><p>Major Lukachenko was smiling brightly across from them. She also had a cigarette dangling in her lips. “So, <em> Councillor, </em>” she addressed Hermione. “Have a light?”</p><p>“Of course, Major,” Hermione handed the lighter over and grinned. “We’ll get them. That’s the part that matters. For Tbilisi?”</p><p>“And Kiev… And Minsk.” The Major’s eyes seemed to glow particularly sharp as she brushed back her hair from the deranging effects of the gas mask, and took a drag on her cigarette. “All the way to London.” The men could mutter, they could worry, they could be demoralised by the sight of the ruined city. Alexandra raised her fist into the air. “Comrades, we’re going to stop them here, and then we’re going to London,” she called out to the rail carriage. “<em>To London!"</em></p><p>“<em>TO LONDON!” </em></p><p>Making a little grin, she got up, and squeezed down next to Hermione on her seat to whisper to her. Being pressed between two women like that made Hermione distinctly uncomfortable, because of their intense warmth and closeness, but also because they were friends and almost certainly both straight. As the train lurched back into motion, she spoke.</p><p>“So. We’re getting rumours from up in Ingushetia. I know you can’t confirm them, but I know you’ve fought Bellatrix Lestrange before, that’s so? Voldemort’s second in command herself?”</p><p>“That’s so,” Hermione answered, her eyes growing sharply distant. She reached down, and nervously tugged at her sleeve to make sure that it covered the scar. “That’s so, Major.”</p><p>“She was there, wasn’t she?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Let’s get a kill, hej? I want to notch another Death Eater to the Unit Standard.”</p><p>Hermione Granger wished that she had anywhere near the confidence of Alexandra Lukachenko when it came to facing Bellatrix Lestrange. Quietly, since the moment she had heard her name spoken about this entire situation, Hermione had, with a gnawing feeling in her soul, begun to wonder if maybe, despite the cigarettes, the short hair, the kill-notches, the AKM on the shoulder, the camo fatigues, she did <em> not, </em>in fact, have it together… When it came to Bellatrix.</p><p>She looked down at the sleeve that covered the scar. Outside, in the corner of her eye, she noticed that it was snowing. Then she leaned in close to the woman who commanded more than seven hundred troops, whose sole job was to guard Larissa and Hermione’s small band of Wizards and Witches, with their lives as required. For some reason, that group of muggles took pride in dying for them, and their confident expectation of killing the enemy and driving back Voldemort all the way to London was something that she could not let down. Hermione firmly set the cigarette in her lips at a cocky angle and grinned, and forced herself to offer the reassurance that she was giving far more to herself and her disbelieving heart than to the hardened Russian woman of the 27<sup>th </sup> Division’s Witch Protection Battalion. “Another notch on the belt, Major. You’ll have it.”</p><p>It turned out that the original information had not been completely accurate. Their train actually continued as far as Ksani through the now heavily falling snow, another five kilometres down the line from their supposed destination of Dzegvi and on the north side of the river. There was a large abandoned factory there which had a massive marshalling yard in front of it, which was perfect for offloading the tanks and vehicles for the troops. Who knew what it had originally been used for, in the days when there was a difference between the Wizarding World and the Muggle World, in the days when Tbilisi wasn’t a city of three quarters of a million mouldering corpses, but of people walking along the river in the sunlight, happy and in love.</p><p>In the days when she thought she loved Ron, and Ginny had Harry. In the days when she never dreamed she’d be sitting in a crowded railway carriage with a hundred Russian soldiers and a Witch from Koldovstoretz at her side, and they all know what she was, and she wasn’t violating the law, because there was no more law.</p><p>No more law except the law you created with the wand and the gun. The train came to a halt with the airbrakes popping and the couplers clanking. “Battalion,” Alexandra came to her feet and held a gloved hand in the air. “Disembark and form for inspection!”</p><p>As they trudged out into the swirling snow, Hermione could see Luna’s armoured train idling on the track on the west side of the factory, out of the way of the marshalling yard. Smoke curled from the exhaust of the armoured diesels, and in the poor visibility of the snow, Hermione could half-close her eyes, and imagine it was the Hogwarts Express at Hogsmeade Station, ready to take them away for winter break. <em> Those days are gone forever… </em></p><p>Then she turned and saw an old model ZiL-111, all black, stretched limousine. The perfect beast of a Soviet leader’s car was idling on the road by the old factory, and an officer had called Larissa over and was speaking to her. Another officer, Hermione realised, was returning with Luna, so she called out to Ginny, “I think they want us!” and started over. She tossed a wave to Alexandra and headed over.</p><p>“Hermione,” Larissa spoke as they approached, “good sense of timing. This is Georgii Kobakhidze. He’s a Georgian Wizard and he’s taking us to meet with Vasily Flyorov at the Dadiani family Manor.”</p><p>“Vasily Flyorov at the … Isn’t Dadiani the surname of the Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft of Georgia?” Hermione asked.</p><p>“Oh Merlin, why couldn’t you all just keep one for the Soviet Union instead of every single new country getting one?” Ginny interjected. “It’s like if <em>Ireland </em>had its own Ministry of Magic. Only you could remember all these names, Hermione.”</p><p>“Russia, Ukraine and Belarus still share the MinKol despite the name,” Larissa reminded her dryly. “We <em>thought </em>there was going to be a union of the Slavic countries.”</p><p>“I bet the Dadiani Manor is <em>beautiful,</em>” Luna smiled. “Are we ready?”</p><p>“What about the battalion?” Hermione asked.</p><p>“We’ll have you back by tomorrow, State Councillor.” Major Kobakhidze opened the back door to the ZiL, and then followed them in. Showing their passes as they departed past the guard shacks, then they sped up north along the river road… And then started flying, and turned back to the south, back across the river and toward the mountains.</p><p>Ginny grinned. “Now that’s more like it.”</p><p>Within a few minutes they were well into the snow-covered mountains to the northwest of Tbilisi on the northern part of the Anti-Caucasus range. They soon found their destination and began to descend. Exactly as Luna had hoped, it was beyond spectacular, with a massy stone lower floor and two stories of elegant balconies all around.</p><p>Two enchanted trees curled to the sides to reveal the walkway up to the Manor, which a sparkle of red light and a magical flock flew along to blow clear the snow to make their footing easy, on stones which glowed when they stepped on them, and the massy stone of the entrance-way on the lower-level gave way to little softly glowing blue fairy lights as the heavy portcullis was lifted, and a stone ramp led to an inner set of doors, where liveried footmen opened the fine, high carved wooden doors and pushed them back, to reveal the enchanted pictures of a long line of Georgian noble purebloods beyond.</p><p>It was, in fact, a dream, a world they had seen precious little of since Voldemort’s triumph at Hogwarts. And beyond was the parlour, where an old man in an evening robe was waiting for them, with a massive ornate old Samovar framed in silver, hot and waiting, and a selection of preserves and pastries set out on low tables before the chairs curved in a circle around him.</p><p>“Hermione Granger, Ginny Weasley, Luna Lovegood,” he offered in lightly accented English, with a sparkle in his eye. “Welcome to Georgia, and welcome to Shinaarsi.”</p><p>“Contentment,” Larissa smiled and translated the Georgian word, and tried to make an approximation of a curtsy in her uniform. “Master Flyorov.”</p><p>“Ah, my little Larissa Sergeivna,” he chuckled. “My wife insisted I convey her honourable regards to a member of the Princely Naryshkin family. Me? I’m going to say that you’re having too much fun getting shot at, you intemperate aristocrat.” He offered her a gruff grin.</p><p>“<em>Comrade </em>Flyorov,” Larissa immediately corrected, and then smiled warmly. “Please convey to Lady Tamar my regards. She’s at the front, despite her age?”</p><p>“I can’t keep her away, you know that,” the old wizard shook his head, and turned his attention to the expatriated English Witches. “You see, forgive me, my guests, but I was one of Larissa’s teachers at Koldovstoretz shortly before I retired. Please, have some Churchkhela. We’re still waiting for another guest to arrive.”</p><p>Hermione took some of the pastry and tea. There was a little cup on the tea plate, for the english sensibilities of most of Flyorov’s guests. Accordingly, Hermione poured it into her tea once she had it black enough from the zavarka and hot water for her preference. Her eyes brightened a bit when she saw, from the way it poured, and confirmed a moment later when she tasted it, that it was real milk, though a little bit different. “Goat Milk, Master Flyorov?” She offered courteously.</p><p>“Comrade, really, Miss Granger. I’m the son of a <em>Kolslep,” </em>he used the Russian slang for Witchcraft-blind, which Hermione usually translated in her head to ‘muggle’, “Soviet physicist, not an aristocrat. I just learned enough chess and table manners to win one’s heart.” He grinned, a kindly thing. “I understand you are much the same.”</p><p>“My father wasn’t a physicist,” Hermione answered.</p><p>“Even better, a true member of the proletariat,” he chuckled, and grinned at seeing Larissa pink a bit at the old language. “And yes, it is goat’s milk, and yes, I tested it for Strontium-90. Myself.”</p><p>“Are you the one who came up with the theory of fission that Larissa was telling me about?”</p><p>Flyorov cast a baleful look at his former student. “<em>Really. </em> Menshov’s …” He shook his head and sighed. “The answer is most assuredly <em> No, </em>Miss Granger. Certainly fission is a complicated subject, and it is one I have some experience with, but I don’t agree with Menshov’s idea of it being an expression of spiritual and moral decay in the material world. That we don’t understand the interaction of magic and radiation, that’s certainly true, but many discoveries over history have been made in both fields, and certainly there’s cause for many bright minds to work on this after the war.”</p><p>“Thank you for the explanation,” Hermione smiled.</p><p>“So, who else is coming?” Ginny asked over her tea.</p><p>“Well…” But Flyorov trailed off because the doors were opened again. The Russian interpretation of the Secrecy of Magic had always allowed for Wizarding families to have closely linked families of retainers—essentially hereditary servants—instead of House Elves, which were not seen in Russia. It still made Hermione feel very, very weird, but she turned toward the entrance to the parlour…</p><p>And the footman arrived courteously to show in a woman in a long trenchcoat, who defiantly dyed her hair—albeit a shock white now--and a black blouse with rows of silver buttons under it. It was of course Nymphadora Tonks, and Hermione smiled, a bit sadly, at the woman she respected, who Neville Longbottom had given his life early in the doomed fight to save from the woman who they now faced: Bellatrix Lestrange, Nymphadora’s own aunt.</p><p>“So,” Nymphadora grinned. “Good to see all of you ladies.” A nod to the older man in evening robe. “Master Flyorov. Let’s get down to it, shall we? My damned devil of an aunt is not taking her time with Vladikavkaz, so the sooner we know what we’re all facing, the better.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>marshalling yard -- this is called a switching yard in the US.<br/>vestibule -- the space between two railway cars (UK english: coaches), usually with a heavy, flexible rubber coupling to enclose it, and metal plates that swing back and forth, so you can walk between cars as the train moves.<br/>OZKs -- Nuclear Biological Chemical gear in the Soviet/Russian Army. This is the Russian equivalent of American MOPP gear (Mission Oriented Protective Posture). It includes a suit and a gas mask and usually a chemical cloak or other outerwear. It is effective against radioactive particles, i.e., the inhalation or skin contact exposure with particular matter which has been irradiated, which is the main source of radiation exposure. It is not effective against ionizing radiation (actual direct exposure to gamma rays or a neutron sleet). However, most radiation casualties are from particulates, not ionizing radiation.<br/>CBRN -- Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear. The common modern acronym in English referring to equipment and personnel specialising in this type of warfare, which has a shared need to avoid exposure to remain safe and similar decontamination, detection, and exposure prevention gear.<br/>S-300s and A-35/A-135 -- Soviet anti-air and dedicated anti-ballistic missiles, often nuclear-tipped, both with an anti-ballistic missile capability.<br/>Black Court of Koldovstoretz -- I follow the non-canon but interesting idea of Koldovstoretz being divided into "courts" with different focuses of education for the students. The Black Court is focused on esotera.<br/>Mashka, M62 -- the nickname for the M62, a class of diesel locomotive of the Soviet railways.<br/>ZiL -- a manufacturing company, so it's like calling the limo a "Buick" or something in the US.<br/>Kolslep -- a neologism I created in Russian to be used as slang, reasonably appropriate for Russian slang, as an equivalent to "muggle-born" in english. It means "witchcraft blind", roughly.<br/>dosimeter -- device for measuring radiation, in this case a low-dose once that maxed out, but really, it's harmless. For a while. Radiation risk is a function of exposure time.<br/>Naryshkin/Naryshkina -- Russian surnames have different endings dependent on whether or not you are referring to a male or female individual.<br/>Strontium-90 -- a long-lived radioactive isotope in a nuclear war that during the first 40 years after the nuclear exchange would cause risks when drinking milk.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chernosvyat</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Chapter Four: Chernosvyat.</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Nymphadora sat down, and poured herself some tea. The ritual of the tea seemed to make everyone feel better. It was calming, and it was something that was shared between Russians, Georgians, Central Asian peoples, British, they all drank tea, just in slightly different ways. There was a moment’s pause as Nymphadora got settled in.</p><p>“This isn’t just a normal operation, is it?” Ginny asked as they got settled. “I mean, Hermione’s promotion aside—congrats, <em>Councillor—</em>we are just not important enough to rate this attention. MinKol meets with President Nazarbayev and Confederal Stavka,” the CIS had gotten some real administrative teeth, at least for the duration of the war, “and orders get sent down the chain. We didn’t get any briefings in a nice house before going east for the Shaanxi Operation, Mas—Comrade Flyorov. So there’s something special.”</p><p>“I didn’t know re-sovietization had become a state policy,” Larissa sighed.</p><p>Flyorov raised his wand and almost sighed something in Russian, but it was more than enough despite the softness; the magic spread from his wand and turned the Churchkhela Larissa was about to eat to stone. <em>Duro, </em>in the Russian variation. Larissa paused with a piece of rock shoved in her mouth, which gave an extremely undignified appearance to her, but she did, at least, show the presence of mind to avoid biting down.</p><p>“Enough politics, lass. Miss Tonks?” Flyorov looked to the still-young Auror.</p><p>Nymphadora smoothly took the lead as Larissa sat down the piece of stone Churchkhela and with a wry expression reached for another. “You are correct, Ginny. This is special. I asked for the 27<sup>th</sup> Division, you did excellent work in the Shaanxi Operation.”</p><p>“You uphold the tradition of Guards Divisions,” Flyorov agreed. “Unfortunately, this mission may be a particularly challenging one.”</p><p>“Indeed.” Nymphadora leaned forward over her tea. “I’m cleared to explain some of the backstory to you ladies, mostly because in retrospect it’s pretty apparent.”</p><p>Luna’s eyes widened and she leaned in, too, like she was going to be told a very special secret.</p><p>“Stavka has been running a programme with MinKol to try and understand the decision-making process inside Voldemort’s regime,” Nymphadora began. “Us British Wizards have been a critical part of that because of our past experience at the forefront of the Wizarding Wars, which because of the Dark Lord’s interests were concentrated in the United Kingdom with limited spillover to the rest of Europe. Working with a very dedicated and competent analytics team in the FSB…”</p><p><em>So now we’re <b>all </b>siloviki, </em>Hermione thought cynically as she listened.</p><p>“...We came to the conclusion that there was a very specific pattern to orders being issued from London. There’s no central authority in Voldemort’s domains.”</p><p>“<em>WHAT?” </em>Hermione stared. So did Ginny.</p><p>Luna smiled. “Does that mean… People do whatever they want?”</p><p>“Actually, yes,” Nymphadora shrugged and reached for some of the Churchkhela herself. “Death Eaters, in fact, are doing whatever they want. They are only really answerable to logistic constraints. Thicknesse really is just a puppet and serves as the Chief Bureaucrat to try and use the administrative apparatus to extract as much as it can out of Europe and the Americas to fund the continued war effort; the Death Eaters control their own armies like feudal warbands and essentially have unrestrained licence to plunder the zones designated as ‘military frontiers’. But what we discovered is that there is no central authority, there’s no plan, there’s no logic. Not since the One Week War."</p><p>Ginny’s face twisted at the mere mention of the formal name for the nuclear exchange that Voldemort had started to ‘cull the muggle herd’.</p><p>“In fact, the analysts came to the conclusion that the One Week War itself was an improvisation in response to unanticipated resistance by Muggles,” Nymphadora added. “Probably the operation to save the Crown Prince and his Sons from Dolohov.”</p><p>She referred to the use of HMS <em>Trafalgar </em>to spirit part of the British Royal Family to Australia and New Zealand, where a non-trivial part of the British military had defected to follow them in the first major blow to Voldemort’s efforts at a smooth takeover of Britain and the EU, and then the world. Australia and New Zealand had since formed a loose confederation, though half of Australia was occupied by Voldemort’s troops. The thought of that, and the uncertainty of the fate of her parents, made Hermione grimace.</p><p>Nymphadora smiled sadly for a moment, and wordlessly handed her a flask. “I <em>think </em>your family is all right, Hermione, but if you need a stiff one…”</p><p>“Eh, I could bring around Vodka or wine, if we have had enough tea for the night,” Flyorov observed.</p><p>“Later,” Hermione answered, holding her hand up. “I want to get through this explanation first.”</p><p>“Right, so when we looked at the One Week War, it looked like it was actually ad-hoc. The conclusion was that, after seizing control of Britain, Voldemort actually had no grand strategy, and he still doesn’t.”</p><p>“So Bellatrix Lestrange just decided to invade the Caucasus for her own reasons?” Ginny frowned. “That doesn’t really seem to help us.”</p><p>“That’s where it gets interesting.” Nymphadora retrieved her flask and warmed her tea cup up. “Voldemort issued her a <em>direct order </em>to execute this operation. And yes, I just said that Voldemort hasn’t really been in control of the war effort. But he does sometimes issue direct orders, and when he does, he tends to ruthlessly kill his own subordinates if they fail. So we analysed the pattern of all the orders that we could actually attribute directly to Voldemort, and discovered that they all ended up having identifiable objectives in terms of <em>magical arcana, </em>not in terms of grand strategy. In short, when Voldemort intervenes to issue direct orders to his Death Eaters and their armies, he isn’t interested in the war. He’s interested in obtaining something he sees useful to his study and power in the Dark Arts.”</p><p>Hermione exhaled slowly. “So there’s no <em>strategic </em> reason for Bellatrix to invade the Caucasus. There’s a reason related to the <em>Dark Arts.</em>”</p><p>“Ta-da.” Nymphadora leaned back in the grand wooden chair with its plush textile patterns of hunting and jousting scenes, and crossed her legs. “We did an analysis of what Voldemort has been looking for in the past missions, and the most common objective that comes up, again and again, are items that protect against Death. Then the FSB psychologists went to work. Quite simply, the Dark Lord… Is a scared little fuck. Thanatophobia.”</p><p>“But not even magic can provide immortal life. That’s part of why there are even Christian witches,” Ginny observed.</p><p>“Well…” Flyorov allowed a smile to trace across his old face. “It’s very hard and very rare, and it has limits, but there are plenty of magical means to restore beauty, to extend life. Sometimes they are cursed. But mythology, especially Russian mythology, is quite full of them. And that is where I come in, and especially the traditions of Georgian wizarding. Ladies, how much knowledge do you have of Russian mythology? Other than you, Larissa, I know you passed all the classes on your own history, you weren’t that much of a rastabout.”</p><p>“Well, uhm…” Luna frowned.</p><p>Hermione, whose muggle parents had been dentists and who therefore had been part of the professional class that actually went to see the symphony when she was a child, felt a name suddenly surge to the forefront of her mind. “<em> Rimsky-Korsakov. </em>Kashchey the Deathless.”</p><p>Flyorov was grinning brightly. “Good lass. And as it happens, we know from the historical record that he came up from the South. From the Caucasus. We believe that Bellatrix Lestrange has been sent to look for Chernosvyat, Black-Light, the hidden land of Koschei the Deathless. Let me try to separate the myth from the history for you ladies, and then, I think, it will be quite apparent what we all have to do.”</p><p>“Koschei was a real sorcerer?” Hermione’s look got intense, and she refilled her tea, not expecting the night to end quickly, now.</p><p>“Oh yes, from a time where, especially in the east, magic was a normal part of life. We know that Koschei the Deathless led an Army to the North, to attack Russia, from ‘the Kingdom of Gloom’, which we associate with Chernosvyat. Many times he led this Army north. We do not know from when he originated. But these legends all agree that his fortress was here, somewhere in Georgia, probably somewhere in the eastern part, near the borderlands with Azerbaijan, near the territory which was called ‘Albania of the Caucasus’,” Master Flyorov explained. “So you see, in those times the difference between the nobility and the wizards was small, and Wand was the <em>Rabdos, </em>the rod of power, as it was for Circe when in the Odyssey she transformed Odysseus’ men to pigs. We kept a closer connection in the Slavic lands to these old customs. It’s said that the first wielder of the <em>Rabdos </em>in the Slavic lands was Iphigenia, who was spared from her father’s sacrificial altar by Artemis and taken to the Crimean, from whence she taught the use of the <em>Rabdos </em>to the Witches of Slavdom.”</p><p>“That’s why your wands are longer than our’s,” Ginny observed.</p><p>“Yes, but even they are much shorter than they used to be. An ancient <em>Rabdos </em>will be like a staff,” Flyorov added. He paused to collect his thoughts, nursing his tea, and looked at them all. “So it was said that Iphigenia was undying in the Crimean as the Priestess of Artemis, because she had been gifted for her sacrifice at the hands of her father with a chance for life beyond life. Here is her poem.” He nodded to one of the servants, who presented a copy on magical paper, which illustrated the blowing of wind, the flashing of knives, the fearful rush of woman and Goddess:</p><p>
  <em>And proud Agamemnon<br/>
Fitting out his prows for war;<br/>
Swilled and gorged his last feast<br/>
In the halls of his ancestors.<br/>
<br/>
In the wine of his house<br/>
Swore this impious boast:<br/>
‘My skills at war rival<br/>
Strong-swinging Ares<br/>
My skills at the hunt<br/>
Exceed fleet Artemis.’<br/>
<br/>
And so Artemis,<br/>
Huntress by the bow<br/>
Heard his impious boast<br/>
Turned far seeing eyes<br/>
Mounted her chariot<br/>
And raced to the Anemoi.<br/>
<br/>
'Call forth the four winds!<br/>
Let strong storms blow!<br/>
The Lord of Aulis<br/>
Has insulted a goddess<br/>
Take his black ships<br/>
Toss them against the rocks<br/>
Destroy his fleet on his shores<br/>
And Troy may yet live.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And the Four Winds Blew<br/>
Dashed against rock and shoal<br/>
The Fleet of Agamemnon<br/>
Was driven back to shore.<br/>
Agamemnon, back to his halls<br/>
Desperate, oaths broken by wind.<br/>
<br/>
Turned he to his seer, old Calchas.<br/>
'Turn to all of Olympos!<br/>
Turn to the home of the Gods!<br/>
What must be done to appease<br/>
The four winds that blow?’<br/>
<br/>
'My Lord, you have boasted impiously<br/>
You have offended the Huntress<br/>
And it is when impious boasts<br/>
Are made in the pride of wine<br/>
That Gods overturn and upset<br/>
All the affairs of Man.’<br/>
<br/>
And Calchas brought his vision to Olympos<br/>
Saw the punishment to be meted out<br/>
For such an impious boast, and<br/>
Turned red eyes to the Lord of Aulis<br/>
Flaming with the sure fury of the Gods.<br/>
<br/>
'My King, Lord of Aulis.<br/>
You must atone to the Huntress.<br/>
No hare and no Hind will turn<br/>
The Wrath of a Goddess besmirched.’<br/>
<br/>
‘Turn now to thy daughter,<br/>
To fair and strong Iphigenia<br/>
Take her, grasp her, bind her!<br/>
Drive her forth to the Altar<br/>
To Artemis of the Hunt and Wood.<br/>
<br/>
If you are to set your prows to Troy<br/>
To avenge Helen and to make the<br/>
Honour of the Greeks wax<br/>
Then Iphigenia must perish<br/>
Must be cast down to Hades<br/>
A sacrifice, blood for the honour<br/>
Of the immortal halls of Olympos.’<br/>
<br/>
And they took Iphigenia, trembling<br/>
And they grasp her, and they bound her.<br/>
They dragged her to the Altar of Artemis<br/>
And put the knife to her breast.’<br/>
<br/>
Artemis, beloved of the Hunt, Virgin<br/>
Beloved of mothers, protector of women<br/>
Saw Iphigenia, writhing upon her Stone<br/>
Her altar, stained, splashed<br/>
With tears of innocence and shame.<br/>
<br/>
Descended from the heavens<br/>
Her chariot unseen in the dusk<br/>
Her bow sure. Shot forth<br/>
An Arrow by which she<br/>
Struck down a noble stag.<br/>
<br/>
Bound it, flung it down<br/>
Upon her Altar in Aulis<br/>
And snatched up from it<br/>
Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon.<br/>
<br/>
When the dagger of<br/>
The Lord of Aulis<br/>
Struck down upon the Altar<br/>
He took only the Stag.<br/>
<br/>
And Artemis flew swiftly<br/>
To Taurida, lovely<br/>
Flaunting the life of land<br/>
Rivaling the beauty of Elysium<br/>
Sprawled out upon the Euxine Sea.<br/>
<br/>
Set her down, Iphigenia<br/>
Daughter of Agamemnon<br/>
Of the Noble House of Aulis<br/>
As an immortal priestess<br/>
A Lady of Taurida –<br/>
Of Agamemnon’s House.<br/>
<br/>
No more to be known<br/>
Her fate instead decreed<br/>
To outlive and to outlast<br/>
The Last Immortal Man<br/>
Secret Hope of Womankind.<br/>
And Mother of the ‘Rus.</em>
</p><p>There was truly nothing quite so beautiful as an old, magically illustrated poem of a Greek myth, bringing it to life in a telling that Hermione had never heard before, and she spent some time enjoying how splendid it was, and how fine of a gift.</p><p>“So you see, immortality was known to us from the most ancient times. But it stems from the divine. And the same is true here. It’s say that the <em>Rabdos </em>of Koschei the Deathless was made from a branch of a Golden Apple Tree. And in some legends, as long as the Golden Apple Tree it was carved from lives, so shall the wielder of the wand. But we know that this is not true: What it really means is that it is, as it is in the myths of many peoples, true that the Golden Apple brings immortality when it is consumed regularly. Indeed, Ambrosia may be made from the fruit of the Golden Apple. But the Golden Apple tree is not something you just <em>plant </em>and let grow anywhere!” He laughed. “It is but a manifestation of the Water of Life. So it says in <em>The Doings of Marya Morevna. </em>What we as the Wizards of Russia and Georgia know was that she was a great Witch, who accompanied the Caspian Expedition of Ingvar the Far-Travelled, a descendant of Iphigenia, who went with Ingvar to stop the raids of Koschei, who took many people from the lands of the ‘Rus into slavery.”</p><p>“It was not that Koschei’s daughter was transformed into a Willow as some versions of the story say, but that Marya Morevna cut down the Golden Apple Tree and planted a magic grove of Willows which grew overnight to steal the source of the Water of Life upon which it relied. Koschei for some reason we do not know could not replenish the Water of Life or get the seeds of another Golden Apple, so he imprisoned Marya Morevna and tortured her, since she herself was a descendant of Iphigenia, to gain the knowledge of her ancestress’ immortality and thereby save his own. Hearing her great sacrifice to stop the evil deeds of Koschei, Ivan Tsarevitch flew to the south and fought there against Koschei. The whole of Ingvar’s Army was destroyed in the fight, and three thousand homes of Swedish Varangians and three thousand homes of Russian sons both cried in pain and loss for their dead, but Ivan Tsarevitch escaped on a magic carpet with Marya Morevna at his side, and many of the Pure-Blood Wizarding Families of Russia claim descent from them to this day.”</p><p>“The water of life,” Hermione felt like raising her hand like she were back at school, and finally tentatively did, which brought a bright grin to the old Koldovstoretz professor’s face. “I’m not familiar with the story.”</p><p>“Ah, yes. The Water of Life. It was water which restored the dead to life, if their bodies were whole, or brought youth and beauty to the living. It is the origin of the story of the Fountain of Youth, and of even the redemption through Christ. It’s said you must <em>cross </em>The Land of Darkness to find it...”</p><p>“Chernosvyat?” Ginny brightened at making the connection.</p><p>“Yes,” Flyorov laughed. “Or at least, that’s what I hoped when I was a young man, newly married to my Tamar, and living in the Georgian SSR for the first time. I was just one more young Soviet backpacker—I spent so long wandering, looking for Chernosvyat, for the source of the water that Marya Morevna took for her sacred grove of Willows. I never found any of it, of course, but I did discover the story of how the Water of Life is stored in a lake on the top of Mount Ararat by the Goddess Anahit. So we searched, as others have, for the lake at the top of Ararat. But the ancients could not even agree on which mountain <em>was </em>Ararat. So there’s only one thing I am sure of, which is this.”</p><p>He took up a scroll from the side of his chair, and leaned down to unfold it on the plush carpet before all of them, in the dim and beautiful smokey light of the parlour. As the map unfolded, it began to glow, showing the extent of the world from the heights of the Caucasus Mountains through the Anti-caucasus range to the Alborz to the East and the Zagros to the south. From Lake Van to the Caspian, the map came alive. And marked on it were groves of trees.</p><p>“It’s a map of every grove of willow trees in the region which existed before modern times in these lands. I only completed it as an old man, by getting satellite data from contacts and friends in the Sciences. But I completed it. <em>Somewhere </em>at one of these sites is the location of Bellatrix Lestrange’s real objective: Chernosvyat.”</p><p>“But, we know from the orders give to her by Voldemort,” Nymphadora then added, “that they’re looking for the wrong thing. Voldemort wants to claim the wand of Koschei the Deathless. He thinks that alone will give him the immortality he seeks. Still, that wand is an example of powerful magic, from a time when magic was instantiated in the world. It is not a thing to yield to Voldemort easily. But if we can locate Chernosvyat, we will not merely be able to keep him from getting it by getting to the wand first, but also lay traps for Bellatrix and her Army. We may be able to cut them all off south of the Caucasus and destroy them. So we need to provide, with our numbers, what Master Flyorov could not do on his own: We need to discover the location of Chernosvyat, and turn it into a trap for our enemy.”</p><p>Luna looked sharply at them then. “Forgive me, Master Flyorov, but doesn’t the Simurgh live by Anahit’s lake? I would <em>love </em>to see a Simurgh!”</p><p>He smiled, and laughed. “That has been said, yes, Miss Lovegood. But nobody has seen a Simurgh in a very, very long time.”</p><p>Hermione could only smile that Luna managed to maintain her interest in magical beasts even in the very heart of all these dangerous circumstances. It was a little absurd, but there was something so normal and thus comforting about it that she could relax a little and know that the world had not gone completely made, Luna Lovegood still cared about magical beasts more than anything else.</p><p>“I should let all of you Ladies settle down for bed now,” Flyorov added graciously. “There is a bath in the morning that will be set aside for all of you, and a hearty meal before you go back to the front. Feel free to ask me for anything you need in your search.”</p><p>“Astana has already arranged for the most recent satellite data to be flown into the region, and our remaining intact satellites will be making additional passes,” Nymphadora added. “So we’ll be trying to use every muggle resource we can get our hands on to feed into the information from Wizarding sources.”</p><p>“And the Division?” Hermione asked.</p><p>“They’re being briefed at the appropriate level… We will hold the 27<sup>th</sup> Guards back as a reserve, and once we’ve located the position of Chernosvyat, we will move them to reinforce the line in that direction. If Bellatrix has information on Chernosvyat’s location that we do not, from some Dark Ages research of Voldemort’s, then we expect that the thrust of her offensive will point in the direction of Chernosvyat…”</p><p>“But by the time it does so, it will be much harder to get the troops and Wizards needed in position to stop her in time,” Hermione finished.</p><p>“Yeah. That. Things will get very interesting if we don’t stop her soon enough. We don’t know what Voldemort can do with what he might find in Chernosvyat, but also if we fail to stop Bellatrix because we can’t predict her moves—because she’s following a plan for a magical objective, not a strategic objective that <em>makes sense—</em>we might actually end up losing the Caucasus, and quite frankly, losing Baku’s oil would be disastrous to our war effort. We cannot let that happen.”</p><p>“Understood.” Hermione sighed and shook her head. Life as a war-witch on the front was <em>simple. </em>This felt entirely too much like the events which had led up to the Battle of Hogwarts. To Harry’s death. To what had started all of this. “Comrade Flyorov,” she grinned at the twitch that caused in Larissa, “Do you mind if I step out on the balcony for a smoke before bed?” She felt vaguely guilty about the idea of lighting up a belomor in the middle of that beautiful parlour.</p><p>“By all means, go ahead, young lady. The balconies are securely on the second floor above a fortified massy stone first floor on Georgian manor houses for a reason, you will be secure against all dangerous things.”</p><p>“Thank you. I bid you a goodnight, then, and thanks for your hospitality.” She rose, and stepped out to the balcony.</p><p>The snow was still falling, and she could see a few out-buildings, and the dim glow of a few magical lights in the forest around them, maybe will-o-wisps or what have you, or maybe something else. She lit up her cigarette, and looked out into the darkness for a while. It was so beautiful, so peaceful, so magical, the forest with the snow, the lights, the charming manor.</p><p>It was like the magical world at its best, before Voldemort.</p><p>She heard someone approach, and turned back behind her. It was Nymphadora.</p><p>“I didn’t know you smoked,” Hermione remarked, not really sure what else to say, not really sure if she wanted to even have this conversation.</p><p>“I don’t. I came out here to talk. How are you holding up, Hermione?” She asked, quietly.</p><p>“I’m fine,” Hermione answered, turning to look back into the woods and take a drag from her cigarette. “The world isn’t, but I’m fine.” <em>Did you have to come talk? </em>Hermione wanted to ask, but she liked Nymphadora too much to just drive her away.</p><p>“I guess that’s one way to look at it… You don’t seem fine,” Nymphadora interjected flatly, putting her own gloved hands on the balcony. “You…”</p><p>“What? I act like a soldier? Well, so do all the soldiers. I <em>am </em>a soldier now. A magical soldier, but a soldier nonetheless. And they drink and curse and smoke, and I want to drink and curse and smoke, and that’s all there is to it.”</p><p>“The last time I saw Ron… He had a different assessment of the situation. He thinks you’re destroying yourself because you can’t cope with the fact we lost at Hogwarts.”</p><p>“Oh can everyone just stop talking about Ron!?” Hermione snapped. “That’s not it <em>at all. </em>I’m finding myself out here, and it all has nothing to do with Ron, or with Hogwarts. And I really think that Ron should stop throwing stones in glass houses because have you seen the way he’s executed muggle collaborators before? Did you <em>hear </em>what he did in Chisinau? Because <em>I saw it. </em>With my own eyes. But that’s not what this is about. That’s why I broke up with Ron, but it <em>isn’t </em>why I haven’t gotten back together with him.”</p><p>“Would you tell me? I know this is hard, Hermione, I … Remember, Ron feels like he’s lost you, that things are unsaid, and I can speak from personal experience how bad it is to leave things unsaid.”</p><p>“Oh God, Nymphadora, I’m sorry.” Hermione thought of Remus, and leaned against one of the poles supporting the balcony above the one on which they stood. “I’m sorry.” She took another hard drag on the cigarette. “It’s just that, I would be a terrible wife to Ron, in every way possible, because I sorted out something in the middle of all of this hell we’re in, and it’s that I was just dating him to try and fit in. I’m a lesbian.”</p><p>“...Not actually surprising,” Nymphadora grinned. “Have you told Ginny?”</p><p>“No! I’m worried she’ll think I’m crushing on <em>her </em>or something. I did tell Larissa though, only yesterday in fact, because we were about to go through Tbilisi, and I get angry at all the people who tell me to be worried about whether or not I can have children in the future, because I don’t bloody care, of course I’m not having children in the future, I’m a lesbian, I’m not going to get married… And with so many wizards dead, I feel pretty fucking guilty about it, all right?”</p><p>“You know, guilt is a hell of a bad way to end up turning yourself into a brood-mare. You don’t even get harem pants out of it.”</p><p>Hermione laughed, and was so thankful that somehow, Nymphadora Tonks had the ability to make her laugh, even after being widowed, even after all she had seen in this nightmarish war of nukes and magic. She laughed, and she knew her laugh was tinged in hysteria.</p><p>“You know… It might be worth telling Ginny and Ron. The Weasleys are <em>good people, </em>Hermione. I think Ron would actually be thankful to find out you’re a lesbian, that it wasn’t his fault … Even if maybe it was his fault, a little. How did you find out, anyway?”</p><p>Hermione stopped laughing sharply, and looked up to Nymphadora. “I had a crush on Luna in school and I fucked a prostitute in Alma-Ata,” she lied as smoothly as she could, a part of her soul going cold with the memory again, and her mind putting real effort in keeping her eyes away from the camo sleeve that hid her scarred arm.</p><p>Nymphadora did not look like she was fully convinced by the second one, but clearly chose to drop it. “Well, Luna is cute, even if she’s as mad as a hatter. I won’t push you about telling Ginny and Ron, but at least give it some thought? Molly would probably be relieved to know, too. The Weasleys saw you like a member of the family already.”</p><p>“Yeah, I know.” Hermione looked back out to the woods, the deck of the balcony creaking under her boots. “Have a good night, Dora?”</p><p>“Thanks, Hermione,” she acknowledged, and stepped away.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The next morning, Hermione went down to bathe before breakfast. But she faced the essential problem she had had in any kind of communal bathing since coming to Russia, where especially in the midst of the wartime hardship, it had become common again (Larissa said it had been fading away, but with the loss of electricity and heat in so many houses and cities, the <em>banya </em>had made a comeback, and Witches preferred it anyway because it helped with some magical rituals).</p><p>To get naked in front of other women wasn’t really the problem. That was, Hermione imagined, inherently a lot less embarrassing for lesbians than gay men. No, the problem was the scar on her arm. Deciding on the best way to deal with it, she grabbed a towel from the large pile of clean, freshly starched ones, and wrapped it firmly around her arm before stepping in. She just didn’t want to explain to anyone where her knowledge of herself had come from. She didn’t want to explain to anyone what that scar was.</p><p>She didn’t want to explain to anyone that they were facing the woman who had written <em>Mudblood </em> into her arm with a dagger. And she sure as hell didn’t want to explain to anyone that that entire fucked up experience had been what told her she was a lesbian. <em>Nope, a crush on Luna and a prostitute in Alma-Ata is definitely much less degrading to my sense of worth. Fuck Lestrange, anyway. Your mind just went completely bonkers out of fear and couldn’t interpret the fact that what sounded like seduction in her voice was pure psychotic crazy. God what a story, though. You must be the saddest excuse for a lesbian who ever lived, Hermione Granger, </em>she told herself.</p><p>But she still felt pretty damned embarrassed when Luna, with a cheerfully innocent smile and as stark naked as the day she was born, welcomed her to the steam bath and started to hit her with the birch broom for the banya, in full view of Nymphadora and the morning after having claimed to the older woman that she’d once had a crush on Luna. <em>Oops, this is as embarrassing as hell. </em></p><p>The look that Larissa and Nymphadora exchanged would have made her turn a solid sheet of red if the heat of the banya hadn’t already accomplished the job. Luna continued with a Very Serious expression to work her over.</p><p>“You look like you really needed this,” she offered, in perfectly sincere perfect innocence.</p><p>“Yeah, well, it’s been a while at the front. You know, with Larissa and Ginny. So make sure you get everyone…”</p><p>“Hermione, perhaps I don’t want to be whipped by a piece of a tree while in the bath!” Ginny exclaimed, but it was already too late.</p><p>That was enough to let Hermione recover from her embarrassment and the nervous shame over the towel wrapped around her arm, and start laughing with Nymphadora. Life went on after all, and by the time they went to breakfast, where they were served <em> Khachapuri </em> with a poached egg in the middle of a melted mass of salty cheese baked in a massive loaf of bread, with Turkish-style coffee and orange juice, Hermione was positively certain that she could handle, as Nymphadora had recommended and encouraged, telling Ginny and ultimately, whenever he returned from his current mission, Ron. <em> And then maybe we can get on with being </em> <em> best f</em><em>riends while I try out this very-celibate-lesbianism. </em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Stavka -- This is an old Russian word whose literal meaning is "tent", but in the military context it refers to the supreme General Staff during wartime. It's a General Headquarters, essentially the supreme military administrative body of the war effort.<br/>CIS -- Commonwealth of Independent States, an amorphous organisation between some but not all of the former Soviet countries... Here it has been strengthened into the Confederacy of Independent States due to the wartime exigencies.<br/>Nursultan Nazarbayev -- with Yeltsin a useless drunk and Putin not yet in power, leadership of the CIS has actually fallen to the Head of State of the /second/ most powerful country, the wily President of Kazakhstan. This also made the lesser countries less fearful of Russian domination.<br/>Shaanxi Operation -- Name of a military operation in Central China that Hermione was involved in before the story starts, the prologue is set there.<br/>Guards Division -- A military unit having the title "Guards" as a reward for heroic actions on a unit scale, considered therefore to be a crack unit.<br/>Churchkehla -- a Georgian candy. Get some if you can!<br/>FSB -- The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.<br/>Siloviki - Plural of Silovik, "People of Force" is the best translation, though that's inexact. The uniformed state services -- those who decide the course of government with the barrel of the gun, to put it simply.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. The Georgian Military Road</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong> <b>Chapter Five: The Georgian Military Road </b> </strong>
</p><p> </p><p>After bathing and eating their rich and hearty breakfast of <em> Khachapuri, </em> which was perfect for morning when you were starving on a cold day when winter was coming on and the snow was falling, they had returned to the 27 <sup> th </sup> Guards Division by flying car, with Hermione finding herself laden with several additional books on the history of the region’s mythology and on Russian wizarding history which she started reading the moment they left the Dadiani Manor. On their return to the Division, they had to land well away to avoid being intercepted by the Buk launchers which had now been deployed, and finished the return to the Division on the highways. They drank tea which had been sent along with them, hot and strong, while the car worked its way along increasingly crowded roads back to the divisional cantonment. It certainly gave Hermione time to read, though even she was a little distracted by the scenes outside.</p><p>There was already starting to be a surge of people fleeing the advance of Bellatrix’s Army, old Ladas converted to run on wood alcohol, or hauled by horses or mules, wooden carts towed by donkeys or oxen, people with bundles of household goods strapped to their backs. That was war. Dressed in rags with a nice Sunday headscarf to maintain some dignity, women pushed their children along while some men drove animals they were lucky enough to own and would not now part for in all the world. They fled to the southwest, through Ksani, to avoid the radiation in Tbilisi. The snow hid most of the dreadful squalor of their passage, but it was nightmarish for the refugees without proper attire, like a white shroud on the corpse of human civilisation.</p><p>But the Army was there. A Georgian brigade had come up in the night, and the people cheered them and the 27 <sup> th </sup> side by side, they even raised a cheer for the Turkmen tank regiments. The suspicion of the seven years after the collapse of the Soviet Union had been repaired by the four years of bitter sacrifice and struggle which had led to this point. The relationship between the brothers had been mended, these nations stood side by side, to the bitter end.</p><p>And it might be a very bitter end. Larissa, the often unserious Pure-Blood Aristocrat, nonetheless had a core of steel in her voice when she boastfully declared that Russians don’t surrender. It was not <em> quite </em> true, but in a thousand fields from Warsaw to Vyazma, Chisinau to Rostov-na-Donu, they had strewn millions of their own bodies and in the process they had given enough truth to the boast that the world no longer thought, hopelessly, that Voldemort’s triumph was inevitable. If it <em> did </em> happen, if all of this was for naught, then they would extract a price yet heavier than could now be imagined. Of that, Hermione didn’t have the slightest doubt.</p><p>The situation would have been totally hopeless without Wizards on their side, of course. Then they would have died, and died gallantly, and for nothing. But the more people she met, the more stories of the Russian Wizarding world that unfolded before her, the more she could trace her mind through the history of the tale, with a few Russian Wizarding books to help the story along: The decision that the Russian Wizarding world had been confronted with at the rise of the Soviet Power. Most of the Pureblood families had ties to the muggle Aristocracy in the East, and they were prepared to blow open the Statute of Secrecy to save their way of life.</p><p>But they found no support with the rest of the Wizarding World, where the Purebloods looked down on their Eastern cousins for having intermarried with even the aristocracy of their countries within living memory. And the Muggle-born and those half-bloods descended from them were not prepared to fight for them, and indeed, some of them were quite ready to fight for the Soviets. The world had sat on the precipice, as the Purebloods in Russia had sent out Wizards to rally the people with images of Orthodox miracles, and humiliate the atheist educators of the new Soviet regime as a warning and a demonstration of their power. Their mansions bustled with activities to prepare for war, and mysterious “third cousins” of noblemen arrived at the headquarters of men like Kolchak and Wrangel.</p><p>Then, they had realised the danger. Both sides had stepped down. The Wizards had not helped the Whites, the Reds had not turned on the Purebloods. An agreement was struck: Koldovstoretz would be opened to all Wizards, of any background. A new Ministry would be created. Wizarding families would receive special internal passports, and their families of servants would receive portions of their estates in land redistribution. The Wizarding world in the Soviet Union would agree to enforce the protection of the Soviet people from magic, foreign and domestic, in exchange for which, they would be allowed to keep their increasingly ratty and isolated manors instead of having them nationalized.</p><p>The pound of flesh would be secured for their servants, and that was all. But it had not worked exactly like the Soviet power had hoped, either; the serving families mostly were stubbornly loyal, and continued to work at the Manors of the Purebloods. But steadily, the arrival of muggle-born Wizards at Koldovstoretz who stubbornly held to the tenets of Communism, to the high ideals, even while learning magic—forced a change. The Ministry, under the Soviet Power, forced integration. The Koldovstoretz curricula began to teach the equality of muggle-born and Purebloods. They started <em> marrying </em> each other. Ultimately, someone like Lady Tamar Dadiani would meet a muggle-born future husband at Koldovstoretz and marry him and <em> not </em> get disowned and thrown out of the household like Andromeda Black Tonks had been when she married <em> her </em> husband.</p><p>The families which refused to accept this fled to the west like the muggle White Emigres. As for the rest? When confronted with Voldemort’s ideology, most of the Pureblood families of Russia knew they would not really be seen as Purebloods by Voldemort. They had already made their choice eighty years before! They had stayed. Koldovstoretz still existed. They would fight for their lands alongside the muggles, or they would perish. The ones who wouldn’t were already serving Voldemort, they were already away. The students of Koldovstoretz had come together to raise a shield so powerful that it had defended not only the school but the whole nearby city of Nizhniy Novgorod. The muggle anti-missile systems had defended Moskva and Petrograd, almost unique among the powers of the world; test systems at Sary Shagan had done the same for Alma-Ata. With three great industrial cities intact in Russia and with Kazakhstan’s industry intact as well, the Commonwealth of Independent States had become the <em> Confederation </em> of Independent States, and begun to fight back.</p><p>And this was the result of it. There were more than three hundred tanks here between the Russian, Georgian and Turkmen units. Twenty thousand soldiers. Thousands of trucks and armoured vehicles. Five hundred artillery pieces; a hundred Ural launchers, a hundred Grad launchers. And a hundred Wizards and Witches from many nations of the CIS and exiles and refugees from the countries claimed by Voldemort. They prepared to move north along the roads, with vehicles idling, with the exhaust turning to ice fog in the air around them, making the world look magical if it weren’t for the smell of diesel.</p><p>They got out of the ZiL near divisional headquarters and Nymphadora led them over, fishing out her ID since she wasn’t in uniform, and then making sure with a quick spell that she actually looked like what the picture showed. Men in uniforms of rank were clustered in tents and near Command Tracks, and drank tea boiled on the exhaust, heavy greatcoats tossed over fatigues. The sun was rising high in the sky.</p><p>General Pronichev and his Chief of Staff were standing by Nymphadora as they came up.</p><p>“Councillor, congratulations on your promotion,” he offered Hermione after acknowledging her salute.</p><p>“Thank you, Sir.”</p><p>The maps were spread out on the folding tables in front of them. “We’re trying to determine the appropriate dispositions for our position in the reserves,” General Pronichev explained. “It’s an odd feeling, being able to decide for yourself where you’ll form the reserves for a line.”</p><p>“ Agreed, Sir, but I assume…”</p><p>“Yes, State Councillor Tonks explained the situation adequately,” by which General Pronichev surely meant ‘ <em> I know what I need to know, and I know that what I don’t know, I need to not know. </em> ’ Thus as it ever was.</p><p>“Right, so…” Hermione looked at Dora. “The road to Ararat.”</p><p>Pronichev frowned. “There’s two plausible ways to Ararat, and they both go through Tbilisi, which means she’s going to keep trying straight south through the rad zone. Not completely unheard of for a Death Eater to do.”</p><p>“Tbilisi was where it was for a reason,” Hermione observed. “Major cities grow up at crossroads. Even from the west there are few other good ways to Ararat, past Ani, and that includes Lesser Ararat. And it also puts us between Bellatrix and Iran.”</p><p>Nymphadora grimaced. “You think it might really be there?”</p><p>“There’s always a possibility, from what I remember of the mythology of all of this,” Hermione admitted “Ararat… Like Master Flyorov said, nobody can agree where it is.”</p><p>“But that’s a real Army invading Georgia,” Pronichev reminded them flatly.</p><p>“The ridges northeast of Tbilisi around Shankevi then, Sir. We can hit Bellatrix in the flank when she drives down the Georgian Military Road to Tbilisi, and if she gets through the defences and keeps going, we can withdraw to the east, counter-march and hit her in the rear around Rustavi, and we’ll be in touch with our supply lines for fuel from Baku the entire time so we can interdict her supply lines and she can’t interdict our’s.”</p><p>Pronichev looked to Nymphadora. She gave a single nod. “It’s a solid disposition, for what we know and what we don’t. I concur.”</p><p>“ All right. We’ll deploy east of the Aragvi with our backs to the Saguramo Range. Thank you, Ladies. I will get the division underway. You are dismissed to your posts.”</p><p>“Sir.” Hermione saluted and then fell in with Nymphadora as they let the command staff get to work. “ How is your mother, anyway, Dora?”</p><p>“Mum? Oh, she’s fine. She’s working for MinKol,” Nymphadora added after a moment, and then wryly admitted: “As much as it pains me to say this… I think she might actually be talking to Narcissa again.”</p><p>Hermione paused for a moment. “What about Draco?” She finally brought herself to ask.</p><p>Nymphadora set her lips into a sharp expression, but it was not a completely unkind one. “Two Times Hero of the Russian Federation. He’s with the occupation Army in Copenhagen right now, I think. If my da’ wasn’t dead, I might even forgive him after what he’s done to redeem himself, Hermione. But my da’s dead. Maybe, someday, he’ll be my cousin. But maybe, someday, we’ll win this war, too.”</p><p>“Even after what happened to his dad?”</p><p>“Lucius Malfoy got what was coming to him,” Nymphadora replied. His infamous death at the hands of Voldemort after Voldemort had discovered their double-dealings at the Battle of Hogwarts was a particularly black legend from how savage and drawn out the torture was, though to his credit—and nobody leant Lucius Malfoy much credit as a human being—he had managed to at least secure his wife and son’s escape.</p><p>“ I hated Draco once,” Hermione confided, “but we became friends when I saw him crying after he got the news of what happened to his father, as much as I can’t believe I’m admitting that. Larissa exchanges letters with him sometimes. I think Narcissa Malfoy was given shelter by some of her cousins.”</p><p>“ I think you’re right. <em> The Princely Naryshkin Family, </em> ” Nymphadora shook her head. “Larissa’s a nice woman for it. Maybe the way the Purebloods here married muggle aristocrats and didn’t think anything of it shook some sense into her, but I don’t know. I just want the best for Mum and I worry about her often. I can’t imagine it’s any easier for you with your parents.”</p><p>“No,” Hermione answered, and the conversation ended as they reached their unit, and Alexandra came up.</p><p>“I heard, you <em> scoundrel, </em> that you stayed at a manor with a banya last night,” she said accusingly, held it for a moment, and then grinned. “Welcome back, Councillor.”</p><p>“You can still call me Hermione, you know. And this is Miss Nym…”</p><p>“Call me Dora,” Nymphadora interjected with a sharp glance to Hermione. “Anything for a friend of my friend, especially for a woman crazy enough to command a Wizard Protection Battalion.” They were a critical part of combined magic-muggle forces and had special training and large numbers of enchanted amulets and charms and other things … But casualties were still brutally high.</p><p>“You’re with MinKol?” Alexandra answered neutrally. “Staying with us for a while?”</p><p>“ As long as necessary for this operation. Strategically, here, we are under the control of MinKol.”</p><p>Alexandra’s lips formed into an <em> oh </em> for a moment, and she re-assessed Nymphadora in her civilian clothes, and then shrugged and nodded tightly. “A friend of Hermione’s is a friend of our’s. The Battalion will protect you. I cannot say that every wizard who has fought with us has survived, but I can promise you that none have died in their sleep.”</p><p>“ Good enough for me,” Dora answered, and extended her hand. The Russian Major shook it, and then gestured ahead, to where they were mounting up in BMPs, BTRs and Kamaz trucks. “That special tasking explains why we were ordered to take the vanguard for the division, so if you can follow me, we need to get underway.”</p><p>Alexandra led them to her BTR-80K, the <em> kommandnyj </em> variant, and hopped in. Around them, many of the troops in the battalion were piling onto the top of armoured vehicles or into the backs of trucks. There were never enough vehicles these days for everyone to ride inside. “See you when we get there, Dora!” Hermione cheerfully called, and prepared to clamber on top.</p><p>“Respectfully, Councillor… Like hell you're getting up there,” Alexandra remarked and hauled herself up to the roof of the BTR first.</p><p>“...But you’re the commander!”</p><p>“I have a radio. And if you can’t keep us from getting lost on a signed highway, what the hell kind of officer <em> are you </em> ?”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes flared at the challenge, and then she grinned and clambered inside the command vehicle. “Come on, Dora, let’s go!”</p><p>Roaring diesels as the snow tapered off, the convoy set off to the northeast, the refugees scattering to the sides of the roads as they rolled fast through a dust of powdery snow kicked up by their passage, tearing through the valley and along the fields, the vanguard of the 27<sup>th </sup> Division.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The Georgian Military Road was a formidable obstacle to consider assaulting, particularly with the first snows already having reached Tbilisi. The pass was choked with snow, and the Russian troops retreating from Vladikavkaz—which she had stormed through in record time, not evening bothering with clean-up operations—had been setting charges to trigger avalanches down on her force as it advanced.</p><p>She had deployed werewolves and animagi to track them down on the flanks as no human, no dog could. In the bitter snows, they had found the charges and disarmed them. Mostly. When they didn’t, fiendfyre melted out the avalanches and triggered more until the roads were clear, with torrents of melted water running down into the river canyons. Those who were not human still moved easily through the snow, and <em> Appare Vestigium </em> let them track down and annihilate the small Army teams falling back. Indeed, with instantaneous communications, an animagus tracking a group of soldiers magically could summon help and instantaneously a lower-ranking Wizard could apparate into an ambush position with a crack team of eight janissaries at his side ready to do his bidding, armed with anti-tank missiles and rifles or even a small mortar section.</p><p>Bellatrix remained near her command tracks and continued using Fiendfyre to clear the road. It was almost boring. No, it <em> was </em> boring. A logistical detail, being executed methodically by the finest Witch of her age. She had fun, though, using her own falling curse to trigger avalanches, a variation on something she had developed herself to prove her power, and now found a way to get some use out of even in the most boring of circumstances.</p><p>The Army had, in this way, torn its way across the Russia-Georgian frontier (the pass was actually further south, well inside of Georgia) and reached the vicinity of Sioni in the valley below the southeastern flank of Mount Kazbek without much difficulty. It had been boring, but the terrain was pretty and the cold air invigorating, particularly for Bellatrix who defiantly went around in her customary corset and skirt even when leading troops through the mountains in winter, though Martin Kempler, one of the Durmstrang wizards who worked as her subordinates, had finally prevailed on her to start wearing a greatcoat over her usual ensemble as the temperature continued to plummet.</p><p>The head of the valley was now only a few klicks ahead, the actual Jvari pass, more than two kilometres above sea level. Bellatrix looked around again, tempted to try and see how many of the birds were really mages or enchanted. Then she decided it wasn’t worth it. She could, in fact, determine which were which, but then came the question of killing the ones that were her enemies… And it wouldn’t help, because her enemies also had satellites in orbit. <em> Her </em> enemies. The attempt to make this all personal failed, because it was an intensely impersonal kind of warfare.</p><p>“Madame Lestrange?”</p><p>Bellatrix tensed. In truth, she’d have happily switched back to using the name <em> Black </em> by now, her true name, the name of the Noble and Most Ancient House Black. The name of all her ancestors. The name that now she alone could bear. Cissy’s treason plunged another dagger into her heart just to think about it.</p><p>“Madame Lestrange?”</p><p>But to stop using her husband’s name would be to risk a breach with his still-living brother, and Rabastan was another powerful Death Eater, in charge of Italy. She could not afford that with … With her daughter back in England. Bellatrix sighed and turned away to face Martin. “Where is Jorge?”</p><p>“He’s doing a forward reconnaissance toward Ukhati,” Kempler answered. “What are Madame’s instructions? The front lines are under sustained rocket fire, though we are mostly blocking them.”</p><p>“I don’t need you to tell me that, I can <em> hear </em> the Grads from here,” Bellatrix snarled. The cacophony of explosions was distracting, like the waves breaking against Azkaban. For fourteen years. She turned back toward Kempler. “Do we have a map? A,” she grimaced, “ <em> muggle </em> map of the terrain?”</p><p>“Yes, Madame!” He hastened to retrieve it, and they ended up spreading it across the bonnet of a Land Rover.</p><p>She looked at all the threads of the valleys on the map, shaking her head, remembering the effort put into reading muggle maps, as much as she had hated the idea, and was even a little ashamed of it. She marked off valleys one after another. “No roads… No roads…” Grimacing in disgust, there was a trace of doubt. <em> Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken the Jvari Pass… </em></p><p><em> You would have failed HIM if you didn’t, you can find a way here! </em> She shot back at herself angrily.</p><p>“The eastern vale has a narrow switchback road, Madame.” Kempler had figured out that she didn’t like hearing her surname.</p><p>“It does… That means there will be a force posted to cover it,” Bellatrix noted, her look curling into a sneer. <em>Muggles, thinking muggle thoughts, using muggle tactics. You thought you would slow me down with the snow, and you didn’t, and now, I will move mountains to get at you.</em> “About three-point-four klicks to get past the steepest of the grades. Kempler, muster our Wizards at this point.” She stabbed it on the map. “Everyone who knows <em>Defodio, </em>to be precise. The others will maintain defensive shields over the Army. We are going to punch a tunnel through rather than try to turn their flank in the mountains.”</p><p>“A Tunnel! Wotan, of course, we’ll outflank them from below! Of course, Madame!” Kempler saluted sharply, and turned to make the preparations, pausing only for a moment. “They do seem to have a lot of ammunition for their rocket launchers. We may take losses if we pull that many wizards off the shields.”</p><p>“Do it! I know—as long as they hold the Caspian they can bring in ammunition like this is Volgograd,” Bellatrix punched a fingerless-gloved fist into the cupped palm of her other hand, and grinned with the tint of madness of in her eyes. “But those losses are acceptable if we turn their line. And I have an idea about that.” Gray eyes gleamed like fresh-cut slate. “ Have a tank brought up here immediately.”</p><p>“Yes, Madame!”</p><p>Bellatrix paced and waited. She looked up to the sky and then to the rocks, the scree-piles, the glaciers, the snowpacks. Troops around them, snow starting to come down from the sky again, military vehicles being busy. She was all alone now and if it hadn’t been for Delphini, she didn’t know that she could take it. Draco had betrayed Him, and Narcissa had chosen her son over her sister.</p><p>Now she just had His gift to her. So, so far from where she was. As they started to pull back, ahead in the valley, a burst of rockets came down, silence followed by the rippling of bursts of clouds of spoke from the explosions, the sharp, quick flashes. The continued silence even after the image was visible, until the rolling roar of the explosions reached her. She remembered the waves against Azkaban, and walked back to the side of her command track, pacing uncomfortably.</p><p>Rolling, clanking, the Challenger II came up as ordered. Bellatrix didn’t wait for the arrival of any of her subordinates, Wizard or muggle, to pass the orders. Instead, she approached, and she gave the muggles her orders by herself. “Dismount your tank!”</p><p>A Death Eater giving a direct order was, as usual, obeyed with <em> alacrity </em> by the Janissary tankers, who leapt down and left the vehicle steadily idling, empty.</p><p>She raised her distinctive curved wand and focused her power through it. “<em>Reducio</em>!” A tank was complicated, but it was not as complicated as a human being, and while using them spell on a human being was complicated and dangerous and uncertain, a Witch like Bellatrix had plenty of control as her power swirled around the massive machine and reduced it down to barely the size of a dog.</p><p>She ignored the shocked surprise of the tank crew, and waited the count of a minute. “<em>Engorgio!</em>” Concentrating her power again, she took the time, and it was time-consuming, to restore the tank to the correct size, and then stepped back with a smirk. Even these muggles who had seen so much magic had been put in their place and properly awed by what she had just done. The engine was still running on the tank.</p><p>Bellatrix felt another presence and turned around to see that Jorge had returned from his reconnaissance. There was another triumphant smirk at his respectful expression at what he had, in fact, arrived in time to witness.</p><p>“M’lady, you’re shifting the dispositions of the Wizards?”</p><p>“Yes,” Bellatrix answered idly. “Your men will take a pounding, but they’re brave enough for that, aren’t they?”</p><p>“Of course, M’lady.”</p><p>“Good. Then let’s go over to the eastern valley. I want to show you where we are going to carry your forces through a tunnel. Not just personnel.”</p><p>He followed her gaze to the tank and his eyes clearly showed that he understood the plan. So he stepped over to the tank crew and spoke quietly with them for a moment. “Permission to allow them to re-board and return to their unit assignment?” He asked after that.</p><p>Bellatrix frowned for a moment, but chose not to intrude on the conversation. So far, Jorge had been a competent and able subordinate and she simply did not have enough interest in knowing how the men thought about her as long as they got their jobs done. They were muggles and they were completely beneath her. But now they better understood the respect that she was owed as a matter of course. “Very well, Jorge, go ahead and detail them.”</p><p>She tossed her greatcoat closed around her, clutching it and looking out, waiting for Kempler to get back. There was something embarrassing about all of these Wizards driving around in muggle military vehicles. It was just one more example of the altogether very underwhelming brave new world they had found themselves in.</p><p>But some things remained the same. She reached a hand through her greatcoat, and felt for the scroll which contained the information that Voldemort had given her. In the end, this mission might be served by maps and tanks and guns and arms, but it was a matter of magic.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Khachapuri -- In this case, Adjarian style, basically a bread boat (bread bowl) filled with melted salty white cheese and with eggs on top. <br/>Lada -- a kind of car manufactured in the Soviet Union and later Russia; basically THE common person's car (if they had one at all) in the USSR. <br/>Buk launchers -- Russian Surface to Air missile launchers with the NATO reporting code of SA-17 Grizzly for versions manufactured after 1998 with improved electronics; engagement range against aircraft of 3 to 42 km. <br/>Petrograd -- Russian version of St. Petersburg rather than being a literal translation; other names of this city include Leningrad. <br/>Sary Shagan -- The primary Russian missile testing range, located in Kazakhstan near Almaty (Alma-Ata); into the 1990s it was a legacy Russian military facility inside of Kazakhstan.<br/>BMPs -- tracked infantry fighting vehicles.<br/>BTRs -- wheeled Armoured Personnel Carriers and scout vehicles. <br/>Hero of the Russian Federation -- Successor award to Hero of the Soviet Union, an award of high military honour for bravery and decisive action on the battlefield. <br/>Kamaz -- a company manufacturing legendarily rugged trucks, especially for military applications.<br/>Grad -- a short to medium range multiple launch rocket system (MLRS), basically a bunch of rocket launchers on the back of a truck. Common Soviet/Russian artillery weapon for salvo fire.<br/>Ural -- As Grad, but longer ranged and heavier warheads.<br/>Smerch -- As Grad and Ural, but even longer ranged and even heavier warheads.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. The Search</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><strong> <b>Chapter Six: The </b> </strong> <strong> <b>Search</b> </strong></p><p> </p><p>Field camp had gotten old fast, but it did have its charms, even in winter. Especially in a natural park. There were creatures, animals all around, including some magical ones, if you knew where to look. The heat came off boilers and other portable heaters, and the sheer intensity could be pleasant, with the cold so close nearby, in case you overheated. Field chairs could be comfortable.</p><p>Hermione was in one at the moment, the diesel stove heating the tent comfortably enough. With Ginny and Larissa and Nymphadora, she was eating boiled buckwheat with smoked sausage and some shelf-stable cheese, and they all had cups of tea, steaming in the air. Her wand was in its holster (because wand holsters were a thing now, the war had made life strange) and her gun nearby.</p><p>They were finishing up their dinner, looking over the map in front of them. <em>The magical map. </em>Flyorov’s map. Outside, the sound of artillery, and probably magically induced avalanches and explosions as well, could be distantly heard. The front-line was only seventy kilometres away, and with Tbilisi a dead city, without any noise pollution to dampen out the more distant sound, one could easily hear the artillery at that distance. It reminded them well of what they were doing, and why it was so important.</p><p>Hermione’s books were stretched close at hand. She wanted to approach this problem as an intellectual one, first and foremost. There was a puzzle here in all of the information that she had available about Chernosvyat. She had to assume that Voldemort had already solved this puzzle, and she had assume it was solvable with the information she already had, or at least, with information that she could obtain.</p><p>Flyorov’s notes were meticulous, and she didn’t doubt he had checked all of his sources rigorously. Taking all of that at face value… "You travel through Chernosvyat to get to Ararat. Somehow, a Golden Apple tree grew at Chernosvyat despite not being fed by the Lake of Anahit with the Water of Life. And Chernosvyat should be marked by a grove of willows.”</p><p>“What if the Willows are hidden by whatever magic hides Chernosvyat itself?” Ginny asked. “You can see the Willows glowing blue, they’re the ones that Flyorov checked personally, and that’s almost all of them.”</p><p>“Mmf.” Hermione made a noise and pushed her plate away, empty. The food and the tea helped. “Master Flyorov acknowledges he could have been standing right in front of it and not noticed it, if the enchantment was intense enough.”</p><p>“We could look for closure errors in satellite data,” Larissa offered, rolling a cigarette in hand but not lighting it. Yet, anyway.</p><p>“Are you seriously talking about looking for something magically hidden with… With muggle data?” Ginny stared at the Russian Witch.</p><p>“Yeah, we could,” Hermione agreed, however, which got her a glare from Ginny. “<em>Except... </em>it’s theoretical and it’s never actually been proved that a magically hidden location will cause closure errors. Uhh, Dora?” She looked to the older woman. “Does the FSB or MinKol have any information to the contrary?”</p><p>“We haven’t gotten useful information out of the closure problem yet,” Dora answered. In some ways, Hermione was still very much the same: There were not many people who would just <em>ask </em>that question.</p><p>“Darn,” Hermione sighed.</p><p>“All right, this is all very entertaining, but <em>what is </em>the Closure Problem?” Ginny finally asked in exasperation.</p><p>“A picture is made up of a lot of small pieces of information, ‘bits’,” Hermione explained to her friend. “Since it’s illuminated by the sun’s light, and the angle of the sun’s light changes depending on where you are on Earth, if you, say, magically hid a manor-house or a valley or something that big, on sufficiently detailed data you should see the angle of the sunset have a gap in it. Mathematically that’s called a closure error, because the equation processing the data won’t ‘close’. But like Dora just said, nobody’s proved it’s actually a thing yet.”</p><p>“It comes down to whether or not you think hiding spells are inherently perfect to their user’s intent, or literal, so that if you didn’t anticipate something when you made the spell, you aren’t protected against it,” Larissa added. “Another of those philosophical issues in Wizarding.”</p><p>Ginny rubbed her head. “We’re going to have an impromptu Quidditch match and I’m going to take you to pieces.”</p><p>“I’m game,” Larissa grinned, and gestured toward the door of the tent and the forest beyond with her wand, like she was about to tear one of the trees out of the ground.</p><p>“I’m never going to get to use my broom again,” Ginny sighed. “<em>Entire trees…</em>” She muttered. “Anyhow. Back on topic?”</p><p>Larissa smirked. “The topic is… How do we find which one of these groves … We can exclude a lot by following the routes to Ararat, yes?”</p><p>“Agreed,” Hermione said, focusing on the map sharply. “We have to. We have to take that guess. Actually, there’s a second point, which is that Flyorov was confident that Koschei’s Chernosvyat was not in Georgia proper in the period.” She took one of her books. “Tbilisi is the heart of the modern country, but it was to the east of most past borders of Georgia.”</p><p>“I’m not sure that map is the right one, Hermione,” Larissa remarked, taking a look at it and seeing it was from 1100 AD. “Remember… The Caspian Expedition of Ingvar the Far-Travelled. So Koschei was active <em>before </em>that point.”</p><p>“Right.” She flipped back to the map before that. “Huh. <em>The Emirate of Tiflis</em>. That’s Tbilisi, right?”</p><p>“Yes, that was the old name.”</p><p>“Emirate..” Dora also got up to look over her shoulder.</p><p>“That’s not a Christian Georgian title. That was an Islamic Commandery,” Larissa remarked coolly. “Interesting.”</p><p>Hermione looked up the history briefly. “It was founded in the early 8<sup>th </sup> century. I think we might be on to something. That’s the period when Koschei was most active.”</p><p>“And it’s said that the name <em>Koschei </em>was derived from the term <em>slave. </em>There were theories that dated him later in the muggle world… But the wizarding histories are explicit,” Larissa patted Hermione’s shoulder. “We’re definitely on to something. It was hardly unusual for slaves to become rulers in the Islamic world—one of the terms for it has gotten a revival lately. Janissary. But before that, they were called Mamelukes, but even before the Mamelukes, they existed.”</p><p>Hermione furled her brow, nodding. She brought her wand up and cast a little spell common among Wizarding librarians which let her project the map of the Emirate of Tiflis over Flyorov’s map of the Willow groves of the Caucasus region.</p><p>“Now that helps,” Ginny leaned in with sharp eyes. “Gets us knocked down to about twenty, in fact. With brooms we could get half of ‘em in a day…”</p><p>“Or with a helicopter, all twenty, and we’ve got that on hot standby for this mission,” Dora grinned.</p><p>“Are you on Larissa’s side or something?” Ginny looked up, but it was with a grin.</p><p>“That still doesn’t tell us which is which, and the Emirate of Tiflis covered half of east-central Georgia,” Hermione looked longingly at her pack of cigarettes. “And we have to confirm the theory. Which means we have to prove it.”</p><p>“Master Flyorov visited every single one of these locations,” Ginny observed, turning serious. “So it’s not obvious. If it really is one of these, he missed it when he visited.”</p><p>“If it’s magically hidden and he didn’t know how to get in, then that wouldn’t be surprising,” Larissa finally gave in and lit up her cigarette. She’d barely finished when Hermione held her own up for a light.</p><p>“Then how does anyone know the right place? How does <em>anyone </em>know the right place?” Hermione asked rhetorically. “What piece are we leaving out?”</p><p>“The Water of Life,” Larissa answered. “There’s no way to get water from Ararat to the Emirate of Tiflis. Unfortunately. Sorry, Hermione, it just doesn’t work.”</p><p>“What if it does?” Ginny asked, then. “What if there <em>is </em>some way to get the Water of Life to the Emirate of Tiflis?”</p><p>“Some kind of permanent magical connection?” Dora mused. “That’s <em>possible, </em>and we might even be able to find a spell which could uncover it.”</p><p>“Only one of these groves is going to be the magic one,” Hermione murmured. She wondered about apparating to the Dadiani Manor, which was not actually far from where they were, but it was really too long for her even now at her current skill and power. She wondered if there had been an oversight in asking about magical beasts… Magical beasts. “Can we raise Luna on the tac net?” She asked.</p><p>“I can try.” Ginny dashed over to their radio, her eyes widening as she thoughtfully caught up with where Hermione was going with the question. “I’ll raise her armoured train.”</p><p>“If those trees drink magic water, they’re going to be magical. Especially since Flyorov is so sure the grove hasn’t died in almost a thousand years. The Water of Life, working on trees, right?” Hermione looked around at her other compatriots.</p><p>“Right, I can see that,” Larissa agreed. “So you think we can find the location by looking for magical beasts?”</p><p>“Exactly.”</p><p>“Magical beasts don’t need to live next to magic trees,” Larissa reminded her, drolly. “I still think the source of the water is a better bet, to be honest.”</p><p>“Other than getting right on top of a spell for transporting the water, some magical process for bringing it directly to the trees from Ararat, I just don’t know how you’d find that… We need to search all the sites,” Dora interjected. She cast a spell to turn her hair pink.</p><p>Larissa stared at her.</p><p>“Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?” Dora asked in her haughtiest ‘I learned this from a Black’ voice.</p><p>“The middle of a battlefield,” the Russian Pure-blood shook her head. “You English. War is a sport to you.”</p><p>“I’ve seen plenty of Russians singing boisterous songs about being shot three times,” Dora answered, a bit slyly, a bit distractedly. “It’s just a means of coping.”</p><p>“Then let’s cope some more,” Larissa laughed, and went to get herself some more tea, though Hermione could hear her whispering the lyrics of the song under her breath.</p><p>It made her grin. “Actually, let’s not answer this question right now.”</p><p>Larissa and Dora both looked at her.</p><p>“Let’s just go to all twenty sites, by helicopter, <em>as fast as we can. </em>A witch to each one. We take lots of pictures, images, samples. Snatch and grab. As much as we can. And then bring it back here, compare our observations, and see if that lets us figure out which location is the right one. We’ve got the priority use for a flight of Galinas, so let’s use them,” Hermione planted her hands on her hips. “We’ll go independently, each one of us can hit five sites within the old borders of the Emirate of Tiflis in a day by helicopter. Let’s just do it. Then we’ll have grass, leaves, bark shavings, photographs, magical and natural—collect them all in different boxes, we’ll use empty ration boxes. Then we’ll come back here and <em>analyse </em>them.”</p><p>“Oh, I love riding in Mi-24s,” Larissa snarked. “But… It makes sense.”</p><p>“It does,” Dora, the former Auror, agreed. “If we can get Ginny to agree to this instead of taking her broom…”</p><p>“You’re plotting to put me on a helicopter, aren’t you?” Ginny had come back. “Here I was, talking to Luna Lovegood for everyone, and …”</p><p>“How is Luna?” Hermione interjected.</p><p>“Her armoured train deployed to Tskhinvali to cover the flank, she’s fine, they haven’t seen action yet. She said that while generally a weeping willow isn’t interesting to one, the Water of Life is likely so powerful that the grove might have Bowtruckles,” Ginny answered. “Alternatively, based on affinities with the Simurgh, possibly Golden Snidgets. She wishes she was going with us. Of course. Perhaps I should get her back on the horn to tell her that it will be by <em>helicopter. </em>She may feel not quite so left out, then.”</p><p>Hermione laughed, and looked dangerously amused. “Ginny, I could find a really rare kind of helicopter to carry her, and then she’d be interested again.”</p><p>Ginny rolled her eyes. “Well, let’s get on with it, Hermione.”</p><p>“Right.” Hermione returned to the map, and with another spell cast an image of the location of the groves onto a military topographic map. “Get yourselves ready, I’ll go speak to Major Lukachenko. Larissa, can you make a few more maps and bring them out?”</p><p>“Certainly,” the Russian woman smiled, professionally now. Magical map-making, the interfaces and transects and projections to capture data, was an esoteric skill normally only performed by a limited number of Wizards, but the Black Court studied esoterica, and now Hermione even wondered how much of Larissa’s skills had been taught to her by Master Flyorov. Certainly it was Larissa who had taught Hermione the spells she had just used, and she was still very excited of having learned a new way to visualise data.</p><p>She stepped out of the tent, glad to be alone for a moment. They had a serviceable plan, but she wished she had more certainty than this. It felt like the search for the Horcruxes again, and that brought back a flash of bitter memories. A flash of Harry’s face… The taste of failure on her tongue.</p><p>“Major,” Hermione greeted Alexandra formally.</p><p>“Councillor,” Alexandra saluted. “Heading out?” She hadn’t been read in to all of the details, but she knew that the helicopters standing by in the cleared field nearby were to be used for a search.</p><p>“All four of us, each on a different bird,” Hermione acknowledged. “Here’s the map, we need to play coverage of all of these sites today,” she further explained as she unfolded it. Her mind, sharp, pushed aside bitter memories and the cold and focused on what was, actually, something of an interesting maths problem of how to plot the courses of the helicopters.</p><p>“I’ll call the flight lead over,” Alexandra said as she took a quick look at the map. “It’ll need to be all three of us to come up with the operational plan.” She turned to give her orders and send a runner, while Hermione went for another cigarette.</p><p>Soon enough, an officer in a flight suit came up, while Larissa, dressed in her full battle rig, also arrived at the command tent, with a set of folded up maps under her left arm. The usual salutes were exchanged.</p><p>“Captain Golovin,” Alexandra introduced him. “Councillors Hermione Grange and Larissa Naryshkina.”</p><p>“Captain…”</p><p>“Anatoly Borisovich,” he introduced himself to Hermione less formally, and offered a little courtly dip of his head to Larissa, which suggested that he was a man with more traditional sensibilities toward the old regime, and who understood that the Russian Witch was also an aristocrat.</p><p>“Hermione Alanovna,” she introduced herself formally, though there was always a twinge at hiding her father’s true name, though being treated with Russian formality made her feel like she fit in and helped make up for it. “Larissa Sergeivna has the maps.” Larissa was, in fact, already setting the copies to the side on the table.</p><p>“We are conducting a special reconnaissance to understanding the enemy’s objectives, Anatoly Borisovich,” Alexandra began to explain. “I’m going to send a reduced squad of six with each of four witches, one for each of your Galinas. Your mission is to get them to each of the twenty sites today. One of each, not all of them, one time for each site, then get back here.” She knew he didn’t need to know anything about the urgency, they could all hear the artillery in the background, that was all the broader information that was required.</p><p>“You know about their <em>apparation,</em> yes?” Alexandra leaned closer as she began to use her trigonometry tools on the map. “This is an optimisation problem, and the Galinas may not the tool for each of the trips.”</p><p>Hermione nodded and stepped closer, adding, “some of these distances we can teleport,” she explained frankly, “So we can get to multiple sites without the helicopters repositioning.”</p><p>“And together we save more time by optimising our route now instead of pushing the machines hard in the air to make up for a lack of planning.” He grinned. “Yeah, I get it.” He got to work with them, and it wasn’t a matter of soldiers and witches, it was just a group of four people around a map, trying to solve a maths problem. That made Hermione far happier than it should; she just plain liked the mental challenge. They had tea and cigarettes, and officers were generally smart guys, educated professionals. There was a comradeliness in the moment which she wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. It was moments like that which gave her the will to keep living.</p><p>They traced lines on the maps and used angles and protractors and rugged old calculators. They computed the fuel burn on the helicopters, and accounted for weather diversions when Anatoly brought up his latest print-out of the weather conditions for them to factor in, and marked off the map and the ops plan with the legs to be covered by helicopters and the legs to be covered by apparating. Soon enough they had their plan. The helicopter flight leader grinned. “And of course, we can do it,” he concluded as Hermione double-checked the last fuel calculation for him. “With your leave, I will brief my pilots. We will be ready to takeoff in twenty minutes, Councillor, Major.”</p><p>“See you then, Captain. You’re dismissed.” Hermione remembered herself; she was the ranking officer in uniform now, and they exchanged a quick salute, after of which he collected the extra maps for his pilots and departed.</p><p>“Well, let’s go make sure that Dora and Ginny are ready,” Hermione said after taking a breath. “Major…”</p><p>“Oh, I’ll keep busy. Remember, we’ve already got teams deployed to the front even if the bulk of the battalion isn’t.”</p><p>“Yeah. We’ve already got Wizards fighting and dying.” That brought Hermione back to Earth. It was time to find Chernosvyat.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>In the eastern vale, east of a small hamlet called Karkucha, Bellatrix had mustered all of her Wizards and Witches with her Army who could practice <em>Defodio. </em>Subordinates saw to the provision of field kitchens and guards. Jorge pushed a battalion of crack Janissaries trained in mountain operations toward the saddle which the switchback road crossed.</p><p>As expected, there was opposition. The troops advanced into a brisk fire from the Russian mortar positions on the ridge. Plunging down to detonate in the snow amidst the janissaries, they soon tarnished the wonderful white blanket with dirt, chipped rockets, and dead men who a moment before had been living. From Bellatrix’s perspective, watching with most of her wizards and forces concealed behind a spur of the main ridge, it was almost like a magic picture show rather than something she was watching in the flesh. It had a distant, unearthly air. The men, clad in white camouflage, went forward, the mortar bombs exploded, and some of them fell.</p><p>Soon enough, the machine-gun nests joined in. With rock piled around them for cover where it was too rocky to dig positions in the heights of the mountains, the gunners confidently poured fire down onto the advancing Janissaries. Close to her position, the roar of a group of mountain howitzers jerked her attention back to reality as one of the Janissary officers brought them up to provide fire support for the advance.</p><p>She turned back to Jorge, back behind the spur to the forward command post, ignoring the food. “There’s no Wizards posted on that ridge. We could clear them off in a minute,” Bellatrix seethed.</p><p>“M’lady…”</p><p>“Yes, I <em>know, </em>we won’t,” Bellatrix gritted her teeth on the words and glared at the muggle, though it faded quickly. She knew that he was doing his job competently. “We have to drive them off without magic so they don’t take this front seriously, yes, yes.” She turned away imperiously, and walked back out to take a look, but she didn’t contradict or overrule her muggle Chief of Staff.</p><p>The black puffs of smoke shrouded the ridge as the crack of the artillery delivered shell after shell around the defensive positions. Bellatrix knew how the game was played, but she had the right not to like it. Impassively, uncaring of the danger of being in an exposed position, she watched the muggles serve their guns, using teamwork and muscle and cleverness to match the power of only a single spell, and contrasted with the elegance by which she could deliver it.</p><p>With a sniff, she turned away at last, and forced herself to get something to eat. It was becoming hard to care about those things, but eating was at least still an automatic impulse from her experience in Azkaban. Unlike other Death Eaters, she had no demands for a special kitchen or chef. She went to the same chow line as all of her soldiers, muggle and wizard, and took a plate, and ate with quick economy, the better to have the food in her stomach before the next inspection or the return of the Dementors, always lurking nearby, or a storm coming up on the North Sea made the bowels of the fortress reverberate so badly that you’d be sick to your stomach from it for days or more, and the guards certainly made no allowance in the provision of food for this.</p><p>The howling miasma of <em>noise </em> in Azkaban was tolerable only because of the apathy the Dementors gave, otherwise one would inevitably be driven made. <em>I am mad, but not that mad. </em>Once, out of morbid curiosity, she had looked up where these Russian Witches she fought would have sent her if they had the chance, and discovered that it was an exile camp on Novaya Zemlya. In comparison to Azkaban, it sounded positively charming.</p><p>Her forces took losses to be sure, but that was what they were there fore. They needed to clear any observers off the ridge, and the Janissaries, true to their skill in combat, did the job that was ordered of them. With the artillery giving them a bridge of fire, they advanced to the heights, and pushed the Russian screening force back down. For the moment, it looked strictly like they were securing their flank, it was a small operation supported by a few howitzers, after all.</p><p>Then it was finally time for Bellatrix and the wizards and witches she had mustered together to go to work. She tossed her hand forward with a snap at the wrist, sharply covered by her sleeves, which concealed the horrible manacle scars from the manacles which had bound and held her at Azkaban. And with that lazy but sharp gesture, they advanced forward. One might have thought it a ramble through the pleasant alpine snow, if bodies and mortar-bomb craters from the toll the Russian defenders had exacted were not pock-marked along the road.</p><p>Then they came to the spot that Bellatrix had identified, and she held her hand up. They had sent a team under cover of darkness to mark it with a flag the day before. Satisfied, she positioned herself, and delivered the first blow to the Earth herself. “<em>Defodio</em>!” Before her, a crater was bashed into the rising flank of the hillside.</p><p>Then the other wizards joined in. Again, again, again. Each one vying with the other, until it became a competence. They tried to exercise their flare, in how they dealt with the spoils, in how they cracked their way through more rock. And again, and again… It became a quick, impromptu competition between these servants of the Dark Lord, vying with each other to see who was the best.</p><p>Except for the one, because Bellatrix, the sole Death Eater there, most assuredly outdid them all. Tearing through 3.4 km of rock to create a tunnel in the space of minutes rather than months, they began to advance into the tunnel to keep the pace up, the wands of some shifting to providing light, and Janissaries following close behind them, now ready to burst out and occupy the valley beyond on the flank. Still further behind her, at the entrance to the tunnel, Wizards rotated out, and began to use <em>Reducio </em>to shrink tanks and guns small enough to be carried through the tunnel. The advance party of wizards on the other end would restore them to size, and their crews, which walked through, would at once mount up and bring them into action.</p><p>Having a bunch of Wizards standing around casting <em>Engorgio </em>on tanks to make them full sized again, and then having their crews mount up and bring them into action, would normally be an exquisite vulnerability that could easily be exploited—at least once the defenders got over the absurdity of what they were seeing (though there were few things absurd in the world anymore). But the defenders were never going to get the chance.</p><p>When the final massive crashing roar of rock and rubble tearing out from the Earth at the bottom of the long descending grade in the tunnel revealed the light on the far end, it was Bellatrix who advanced through the rubble first. With a crack team of Wizards at her side, she came out with her wand blasting spells. She would cover the attack <em>personally, </em>and her presence guaranteed that support was brought up with alacrity, as over her head, the Janissaries on the ridge poured down fire which seemed intimidating right up until Bellatrix’s wand was unleashed. The remaining defenders were swept from the valley in minutes, and her forces began preparing to push south.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Galina -- one of the nicknames for Mi-24, a helicopter called the "Hind" in NATO reporting codes, a very heavily armed helicopter that can also carry eight troops. It's also nicknamed a "Krokodil".<br/>Koschei the Deathless -- Also Kashchey the Immortal, or Koschei the Immortal. Figure from Russian mythology, probably at least pseudo-historical reference to a non-Russian warlord of legendary age and power commanding raiding nomads from the southern steppe.<br/>Emirate of Tiflis -- as noted, Tiflis was a historical name for Tbilisi. This was the furthest west Islamic state in the Transcaucasus region in the medieval times.<br/>Ingvar the Far-Travelled -- Swedish Viking warlord who led a plundering expedition down the Volga to the Caspian. His forces did not return to Sweden and many Runic inscriptions memorialising them exist.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. The Helicopters were Circling</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Seven: The Helicopters were Circling</p><p> </p><p>They had their gear, their sample bags, their magical materials, their cameras all ready. The four helicopters in the clearing stood ready under overcast skies, though with visibility out to at least ten kilometres with a cloud ceiling at three thousand metres—not terrible flying conditions for winter in rugged terrain. The whine of the engines could be heard even before they stepped out onto the cleared farmer’s field.</p><p>Four of the massive Mi-24 assault helicopters, called “Galinas” or “Crocodiles” by their crews and “Hinds” on the NATO recognition guides which Voldemort’s forces used out of convenience considering their heritage in the parts of the British military he had suborned, now set at the ready. The whirling rotors had already scoured the snow off the field, depositing it in weird drifts, the brief storm of snow-dust blowing having quieted down.</p><p>The group of four Witches paused for a moment. Dora presented her fist. “Good luck, y’all,” she said with a cheerfully exaggerated drawl, bumping her fist against the others’ in turn, and then Hermione reached out and grabbed their hands, looking especially to Ginny. “You’re all my friends and I know you’ll do fine. It’s a simple recon and you’re protected by the best and flying with the best. See you all back here tonight.”</p><p>With waves from friends, more important than formal rank, they headed out. Hermione boarded Captain Golovin’s helicopter herself, where the weapons officer help her strap in, and she exchanged a quick salute with Sergeant Vasily Baikin, who was leading the protection squad. For weight reasons it was only six men including the sergeant, instead of the usual eight they were afforded in combat for close cover.</p><p>Now the rotors really began to churn. Captain Golovin eased the throttles open and with the two massive turboshaft engines screaming overhead, the Galina rose into the air. One after the other, the four helicopters rose and headed toward their respective, separate destinations. Hermione watched her friends grow smaller and smaller and disappear into the beats of the rotors off the hills and the sweeping overcast grey of the sky. Vasily had been commanding her protection squadron now for more than two years, and it was remarkable that he was still alive.</p><p>Few things bothered Hermione as much as that fact—that all the Witches needed to be ready and to expect to lose the members of their protection squad on a regular basis. But they also hadn’t been in combat since being shifted from Gansu so they hadn’t seen each other nearly as much as they had during the Shaanxi Operation. “Hey Vasya!” She shouted, to be heard over the rotors, the informal nickname showing just how close they were . “They’re not skimping on your chow, are they?”</p><p>“No,” he laughed. “We’re eating fine. Just like you, Hermione.” He pronounced her name more like <em> Germiny, </em> but that suited Hermione just fine, and he allowed his bemusement at her slightly fussy concern for the squad.</p><p>Of course, that belied how tough and brave of a man he was. He had once even gunned down a Wizard at close range using a Saiga-12 when he had been distracted facing Hermione; the other members of a protection squadron were armed with AN-94s—if the wizard chose wrong in their blocks, the second bullet from its unique firing mechanism could slip through for a kill—and of course the ever-present Dragunov for long range fire. But kills by protection squad members were rare, their job was to die to keep a Russian or allied Witch or Wizard alive and doing their job.</p><p>Fourteen. She had lost fourteen in four years of fighting—of which she had only spent three at the front. That was why she didn’t want to be alive when this was all done. Fourteen muggles had already willingly sacrificed their lives for her, up close and personal. That didn’t include the ones who had died in the air, providing her support in aerocraft, or the ones who had died in more distance positions supporting her on the ground.</p><p>Fourteen, but she was still Vasya’s friend. She wasn’t going to let this war change that. She wasn’t going to let this war marginalise the fact that they were living men.</p><p>Kill her, sure. Kill her hope, kill her faith, kill her relationship, sure, whatever, those things didn’t matter. But she would be friends with the people who laid down their lives for her, gladly and with a laugh in their eyes. She knew why they did it. She would respect that, or she wouldn’t be Hermione Granger, not anymore, and not in a way that she ever wanted to lose.</p><p>The searching was as methodical as they could make it when they arrived at the sites. They cast spells, they took normal photographs, magic photographs and IR camera footage of the surroundings, they scraped bark and grabbed leaves from the Willows. They grabbed samples of soil, and whenever there was a chance, water, and other plants near the grove, while their protection squads stood guard. Four locations… Eight… Twelve.</p><p>For the most part, these groves were secluded, or the arrival of a Galina carrying a squad of soldiers quickly made any of the locals in the area desire to make themselves scarce. Either one was suitable to the needs of the sampling parties, moving quickly as they did. Apparation between locations was used by some of the Witches to get to additional locations—Letting their squad touch their shoulders and hands, the men went with them, familiar with it now, so nobody threw up, determined, committed enough to trust a girl in some cases still quite young with something they couldn’t understand. A chance to fight back…</p><p>At the seventeenth location, however, Hermione arrived conventionally by helicopter. Captain Golovin kept the rotors slowly turning and the engines idling, because they were in a rather exposed position only about one hundred and fifty kilometres from the nearest reported position of Bellatrix’s troops. It was south of the Georgian town of Askilauri, further east along the same mountain range they had been camped in at the start of the day. There, unlike the other groves, there was a simple mountain cabin, a dacha, near the grove, or at least the Georgian equivalent, anyway.</p><p>An elderly man stepped out at the commotion, and called to them: “Soldiers, brave lads, I don’t know why you’ve come, but have some tea!”</p><p>“We’re here on Army business,” Vasya said easily, going to distract him. He made a little hand-signal to Hermione, a request for her to check for magic in the vicinity.</p><p>Stepping toward the Willows, she flashed her wand through a few detection spells, keeping her eyes moving like they were on springs, flashing from place to place. Satisfied, she signed to Vasya that it was safe, and slipped into the Willows to do her usual sampling, take the photographs, bag samples into a small bag of holding to be more easily carried, and head back out.</p><p>It was the last run of the day, eight hours of intense flying, sampling, and magic, when she stepped back out of the Willows. Evening was coming on, and helicopter operations would get dicey if they didn’t leave soon. Hermione headed back with her sampling bags slung close by, enjoying the remote and expansive woods with the mountains hard-by to the south.</p><p>Vasya had handled the old man very professionally. He had spoken with him while the rest of his team spread out to scout and to guard Hermione and the perimeter. Then one of his men had wandered back, and accepted an offer to take tea himself, and Vasya had wandered off, and they had repeated this, so that all of the members of the squad circled through to talk to have tea, while they maintained five elsewhere on guard, quite subtly, without ever saying what they were there for.</p><p>In fact, the sixth man, having tea with the old man, was part of the guard too, because even though he was not an identifiable threat, he had to be treated that way just to be safe, and so it even made sense to keep someone nearby him. He was in detention without ever actually being detained, and it showed the kinds of professionals that the Wizard Protection Troops were. They were on par with the regular special forces, or arguably by this point in the war, better. It turned out the man’s name was Zurab Sologashvili and he had lived on Giorgi Saakadze Lane in Tbilisi when the bombs fell. He was quite talkative.</p><p>Hermione, finishing up, t ossed a signal to Vasya that was she ready to head out, but the old man couldn’t resist calling out, “Lady Officer, some tea?” and she couldn’t resist taking a moment.</p><p>“Thank you,” Hermione answered, accepting the cup as the squad pulled back toward the helicopter. He proved very talkative. Lonely, to be sure.</p><p>“I have not had many visitors,” he admitted with a kindly smile. “I hadn’t expected to live long enough to have any. I was in Tbilisi, when the bombs went off; I was badly burned, and came here, to my cottage, to die. But I gave myself herbs and willow bark for the pain, and gradually, I got better.”</p><p>“Huh,” Hermione agreed politely. Rad was a hell of a thing. Sometimes it killed you quickly and sometimes people survived doses which no being should.</p><p>“The enemy, they are trying to come south?”</p><p>He could hear the artillery as well as anyone else, so there was no point in trying to hide it. “They are, but we’ll stop them,” Hermione answered with a confident smile. “ Now we’ve got to fly, though. Good luck, Mister Sologashvili! ”</p><p>She turned away with a last wave, as the helicopter began to spin up and then, at full power, Captain Golovin took off from the open grassy moor and cleared the trees, heading west. As they did, a chill slipped over her, a thought that Hermione couldn’t quite get out of mind. <em> Willow is a painkiller, alright, but it would have done nothing to heal him from the radiation. He didn’t look burned at all, but he came there expecting to die… Merlin, if those Willows are watered from the tree of life! </em></p><p>Hermione was trembling. She felt that the mountains—there wasn’t the slightest sign of Chernosvyat, but it could just be well-hidden—were a good candidate, and there had been running water coming off of them, flowing from the south to the north into the grove, in little rivulets. <em> Willow-bark. </em></p><p>She almost ordered Golovin to bring the helicopter about and return to the glade. But she decided that she would not risk it with the light fading, and with the risk that additional activity would attract the attention of their enemies, already so close. Instead, she would plan and do this deliberately. She needed to check Mr. Sologashvili’s health, with both a magical healer and a Doctor. She needed to survey the site thoroughly. And she needed to figure out how it was possible for those to be the magical Willows.</p><p>Still, when they returned to their camp, the last of the helicopters to make it back, Hermione was trembling with excitement. She made haste to the command tent with Golovin, where Alexandra and the other three witches were already waiting for the debrief.</p><p>She couldn’t contain herself. “I think I’ve had a breakthrough,” she came in as she entered the tent. It made Golovin’s eyes widen. To him, after all, there had been nothing recognisably significant at the site.</p><p>Alexandra thrust a cup into Hermione’s hands and turned to the guards. “Secure the command post, nobody in regardless of their countersign until I order otherwise.”</p><p>She waited, then, for Hermione to sit, looking intense. “Have out with it, will you?”</p><p>“Yes.” Hermione quickly relayed the story of Mr. Sologashvili and his willow bark cure for radiation poisoning the man himself thought would be fatal. “He said where he lived in Tbilisi. Can we check if that was anywhere near the hypocentre of one of the bombs?”</p><p>“Yes,” Alexandra agreed flatly. “We'll have to contact the Georgian Ministry of Defence at Kutaisi. What else?” She dashed a note off and handed it to one of her staff lieutenants.</p><p>“I want to take a Doctor and a Healer back there as soon as possible to run checks on him. And thoroughly survey the site for where one small stream heading up into the hills was coming from.”</p><p>“Tomorrow morning, then.” Alexandra looked around. “Any thoughts?”</p><p>“Yes, a question actually,” Larissa spoke up, having listened in silence to Hermione’s report. “The helicopters are flying high enough that Janissary radars might be able to detect and track them from their current forward positions. If Voldemort already knows the location of Chernosvyat, that’s a problem. It may trigger our enemy to move faster than we expect, even at increased risk. Should we send a second helicopter back, or should we get the entire battalion underway overnight in trucks so we’re not revealing our return to the site?”</p><p><em> Shit she’s smart, </em> Hermione shook her head tiredly and reminded herself that her friend was no slouch at this despite all the affected aristocratic hauteur. “It’s not sure enough yet and what if it turns out to be nothing? We’ll be out of position.” That was her only answer off the top of her head to Larissa’s observation.</p><p>“Point.” Larissa sighed. They had all done a <em> lot </em> of work that day. “Then we review everything, right? Go to sleep, fly in tomorrow…”</p><p>It was Dora who spoke up then. “Entire battalion on fifteen minutes hot standby to roll out. We get confirmation in the morning, we just start rolling. How long will it take, Alexandra Rostislavna?”</p><p>“It’s about fifty-five kilometres by road, but with two dog-legs over mountains with lots of switchbacks, which in this weather, even with witches clearing the way for us, is probably four hours,” Alexandra replied. “There’s no direct route east of Tezami, sorry.”</p><p>“Anything else?” Hermione looked around the table.</p><p>“I think we should ask for Luna as reinforcements because she’s already read in,” Ginny answered.</p><p>“I agree,” Hermione nodded. “South Ossetia hasn’t come under attack yet and if we’re right probably won’t since Lestrange’s offensive will trend southeast. And Luna might be useful. We don’t actually know how to get <em> into </em> Chernosvyat even if we find it, not yet. And the more helicopters travelling to different places tomorrow, the better, so having one going to Tskhinvali will be useful. The other three… We could fly at low level over the mountains southeast toward Mamkoda,” Hermione suggested, looking at the map. “How about that, Anatoly Borisovich?”</p><p>“Yes, it will work,” the Air Force officer agreed. “With the light, anyway, and some risk for the weather, but we’ll get the report sent in starting at 0400. Fly south of the ridge and then come up from the vicinity of Mukhrovani.”</p><p>“Who will we have for a healer?” Larissa looked down at her tea. “And with this much in me, I won’t sleep, so let’s go over the other sites tonight.”</p><p>“I was thinking Sergei Alexandrovich,” Hermione answered. “And yes, I don’t want to leave-off. We don’t want to put all of our eggs in one basket.” She started to empty her own bag of holding.</p><p>“Alright. Well, tomorrow will be hell of a day,” Alexandra shrugged, and watched them with wide, interested eyes. It was just a brief moment when magic could still seem magical.</p><p>But soon enough, one of her subordinates came back, bearing a message, and it made her eyes narrow again, and interrupt the sorting. “You may be interested in knowing this,” Alexandra said rather drolly, “But Giorgi Saakadze Lane is within six hundred metres of the hypocentre of one of the nuclear initiations. I think, Hermione, you might just be on to something.”</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix’s flanking attack had forced the retreat of the CIS troops defending the pass. With the two valleys converging near Bibiliani, her troops had driven the retreating forces back toward the Zhinvali reservoir. She had started the day eighty klicks from her objective, and would be ending it only fifty klicks from her objective.</p><p>It was not bad progress for a single day. More to the point, she was confident she could now easily apparate there. Certainly, it required an extremely powerful Wizard to apparate distances like the whole length of England, which her Dark Lord could do. Originally, because she wasn’t sure how long the search would take or if she could easily gain access to Chernosvyat, she had decided to occupy the position, and now, especially considering how strategically useful it would be for their overall military mission. Having successfully crossed Jvari Pass and brought her troops within striking distance of the Poti – Alat rail line and threatening the occupation of all of Georgia, it certainly seemed worth it.</p><p>But she had wanted to make sure to bring enough personnel along to secure the site, if she did apparate. The closer that she got, the better for that.</p><p>Even as Bellatrix settled down for the night, the roaring of the guns was a constant reminder that her forces were in constant combat. The enemy was not yielding further than they needed to so that they could assume the next good defensive line. There was no cessation of combat, and there were certainly no surrenders.</p><p>Carrying a wand and so, so far from Azkaban, she shrouded herself with a cloak of silence with a spell that would not leave her vulnerable at close range, but from around her tent ended the intrusion of the roaring of guns and the launching of rockets. It finally brought some measure of calm to her mind.</p><p>That day, she had driven the defending troops back with a whirlwind of fire, both literally on a few occasions by the use of Fiendfyre, and figuratively with her energetic and demanding mania in the offensive. They had transported an entire battalion of tanks and a battalion of SP guns through the tunnel by shrinking them and restoring them to full size, and a full brigade of troops. By that point, her Wizards had cleared the Switchback and further reinforcements had flooded in by that route.</p><p>With the enemy present in such strength on one flank, the defensive position was already compromised. But to Bellatrix combat was unending and unrelentingly for as long as she had strength for it, and she had personally led her Janissaries down the flanking valley with a very strong contingent of wizards, cutting through multiple attempts to establish secondary defensive lines. In the end, the Russian troops had simply chosen to withdraw far enough to reestablish a line rather than continue to directly engage her whirlwind, and had retreated under a massive barrage of artillery and rocket fire which had forced all of the wizards in her column to defend themselves from distant attack which they could not see, could not reply to, for long enough for the front-line infantry and tanks to disengage and retreat back to the reservoir.</p><p>It had been glorious, bloodthirsty work at the head of an Army, and the Screams, the dreams, the nightmares were all absent that night. Bellatrix slept soundly, like the dead, but far from it. The death, the bloodshed, the adrenaline and the feeling of power had all paid a due to her screams and left her comfortable.</p><p>A refreshed and energetic Bellatrix Lestrange greeted the morning. She splashed rosewater on her face, and pulled on her customary skirt and dragon-skin magically armoured corset, which she had to use a quick spell to finish cinching. The coat was now obligatory, with Bellatrix having no real desire to find herself exposed to the cold outside without it. There had been plenty of cold in Azkaban. With her head freshly cleared, she had no interest in reprising her disregard for it at the top of the Jvari Pass.</p><p>Arriving at the tent surrounded by Command vehicles which represented her headquarters, she ducked in to see tea and food waiting, and sat down in a folding chair to eat the later quickly and sharply while Jorge gave the morning reports on the fighting around the Zhinvali reservoir. With evaporated milk in her tea and her feet kicked up on another chair, she listened sharply, occasionally idly glancing at her wand and thinking how lucky she had been to regain it in a search of Hermione Granger’s possessions at Hogwarts when the survivors of the Order of the Phoenix had fled too quickly to retrieve their things upon Voldemort’s triumph.</p><p>Then something he said made her sit up straight and fix a sharp expression at him. “M’Lady should also know that long-range radar detected aerial activity near Objective X, both yesterday evening and this morning.”</p><p>That was all the Muggles knew about it, of course. “Objective X”. They didn’t know anything else, and only a dozen of her command staff even knew that there was such a thing as Objective X. The Army doubtless thought their goal was to cut the railroad, occupy Georgia, and as far as the Army was concerned, that was not entirely wrong.</p><p>But now Bellatrix’s grey eyes were unrelenting in looking at Jorge. “How many flights?”</p><p>“One the first time. The second we could barely pick up, only on approach from the south. One, but anomalous; it might be more, M’lady.”</p><p>“Send for Kempler,” she ordered.</p><p>“May you live forever,” he saluted, and turned away. He didn’t see her grimace at the words.</p><p><em> That might have just gotten even more challenging, </em> Bellatrix thought disgustedly, wanting nothing more in that moment than to silence the salute that she received. Instead, she clasped hands clad in black leather gloves together, pressing them up against her face, ignoring her tea, looking out at the snow-covered hills that they still had to fight through to the south, and shaking sharply for a moment. As usual, she was going to have to find a way out of this predicament and find another path forward. She glanced back down to her wand, feeling restless at the flow of information around her, at the <em> muggles. </em> But then she drove the feeling back down. <em> Use it. Use it to win. Winning matters more than anything else. </em></p><p>Jorge returned, with Kempler at his side. Both saluted. Bellatrix leapt to her feet, feeling restless. “There’s been activity at Objective X, multiple helicopter flights yesterday and today,” Bellatrix explained to Kempler. “I need to know if they’re <em> up to something.</em>” She clapped her gloved hands together.</p><p>“Jorge, where did the helicopters leave from?”</p><p>“We didn’t track the second group the whole way, but we saw sustained helicopter operations from a site on the northern slope of the Saguramos, M’lady. And that’s where the first helicopter, yesterday, originated. They were circling for some time over the Saguramos that day, and today one also went west, and is returning now.”</p><p>Bellatrix’s brow furrowed and she paced. “What’s there?” Her words cut sharply. “I mean, what enemy units are at this site, <em> dear </em> muggle? Can we tell?”</p><p>“...I could check the radio intercepts, M’lady,” Jorge answered after a pause. “I shall do so at once.”</p><p>“Yes, you shall.” Bellatrix gestured for Martin to walk with her in the meantime. “These fuckers may have figured out what we’re here for,” she said, stalking between the Command vehicles. “And if they have, I’m going to act now. Trust Jorge, he is very good at making all the other gross little muggles do things <em> usefully. </em> He wants to win, so let him, and don’t kill him for stupid little mistakes. I need an Army, not these ridiculous mobs we have on other fronts. But you’ll be in charge.”</p><p>“<em>M’lady</em>?”</p><p>“Well, of course, I’ll have to go personally. And you will keep driving until you reach the railway, understood?”</p><p>“I—Yes, M’lady.”</p><p>“Good.” She spun back toward the tent. “Let’s see what Jorge has found out.”</p><p>He came to attention as they arrived; it had only taken him a few minutes to retrieve the data from his comms section. “78<sup>th </sup> Wizard Protection Battalion plus some aviation elements.”</p><p>“The 78<sup>th </sup> Wizard Protection Battalion.” Bellatrix felt herself grow unpleasantly cold. “Who is the Chief MinKol officer with the 78<sup>th </sup>and its attached wizards? Do we have that in our intelligence files?”</p><p>“Yes, I pulled them…” He extended the dossier, which Bellatrix took, too cold to be upset, or even thankful over his competence, took with a nervous intensity.</p><p>“Granger, Hermione Alanovna.” She twisted the dossier in her hands, and started cackling, giggling hysterically, even. “Granger… Hermione Alanovna.” Her ugly, blackened teeth flashed. “<em>Mudblood.</em> <em>Mudblood </em>herself is over there trying to keep me from serving My Lord.”</p><p>She abruptly stopped and drew herself up to her full height. “Kempler, prepare your best action team. I need eight of your best wizards. There’s nothing in doubt, now. They’re looking for Objective X, and I will need to go ahead. Come up with the Army as fast as you can.” She looked to <em> both </em> of them, Wizard and Muggle. “<em>Come up with the Army, As Fast As You Can,</em>” she repeated. “Reach Objective X <em> at all costs</em>.”</p><p>She turned away to look to the south, ignoring the salutes and acknowledgements of her subordinates. She stood there, and spoke to herself. “Haven’t you gotten bored of fighting us yet, Muddy? Too scared to do more than beg, like last time? I thought after we got your precious Potter My Lord would have taken the wind out of your sails. Mmn. Might just have underestimated you.”</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Okay, so this took a little longer than I expected to get to the first big moment, but, next chapter!</p><p>References:<br/>Saiga-12 -- a fully automatic Russian shotgun.<br/>AN-94 -- a highly complex assault rifle meant to fire two rounds in a single recoil action, creating two tightly spaced bullets hitting in the exact same spot. In this case an inexperienced wizard might block the first and not realise the second had even been fired. Unsuited for mass production, troops in the Wizard Protection Battalions carry them for precisely this purpose.<br/>Kutaisi -- a city serving as the temporary capital of Georgia after the nuclear attacks on Tbilisi.<br/>Willow-bark -- can be used as a pain reliever, containing chemicals related to aspirin.<br/>hypocentre -- term of art for the point on the ground nearest to the point in the air that an "air burst" nuclear weapon initiation occurred.<br/>SP guns -- Self-propelled artillery; artillery pieces integrally mounted to a mobile chassis.<br/>IR -- infrared<br/>Turboshaft -- Basically a jet engine with a drive shaft instead of using pure thrust. It's what powers helicopters and turboprop aerocraft.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. The Halls of Gloom</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Eight: The Halls of Gloom</p><p> </p><p>The moment that aeronautical twilight had appeared, cracking the plain of the sky with the very first dim light to presage the dawn, the Galinas started to spin up. One headed west and three headed east by a circuitous route that still took less than an hour. They were on the ground by the grove by civil dawn. Three six-man protection squads immediately fanned out to take up positions, while the birds were shut down hard and their crews, led by Captain Golovin, began pulling camouflage netting over them. When they were done, they would settle down with their own rifles into close-in defensive positions around the landing site; due to the short flight there had been plenty of reserve payload for extra guns and arms.</p><p>Sergei Alexandrovich Bazhenov, one of the healers attached to the Divisional medical staff, had checked out Zurab Sologashvili first and confirmed his excellent health. Then Dr. Zhurova had done the same. In the meantime, Ginny and Larissa had gone to scout the little rivulet which ran back to the south up into the hills. Hermione and Nymphadora headed into the grove itself, and after a little while actually spotted a Bowtruckle, which gave Hermione a surge of hope.</p><p>They soon made their retreat back to the position of the helicopters. There was nothing else immediately apparent in the grove. Hermione waved to Golovin where his crews had finished setting up the netting for the helicopters, but sat down with Nymphadora far enough away to have a private conversation, brushing enough snow off some rocks to keep from getting their clothes wet.</p><p>“So what are we going to do if we encounter her, Dora?” Hermione finally asked. It was just the two of them, and they hadn’t discussed it before. And even finding Koschei’s wand before Bellatrix didn’t mean that they were not going to have an encounter. In fact, if anything, it made it much more likely. “Are you…”</p><p>“I owe Neville. Of course,” Nymphadora answered with abrupt coldness. “She’s never been a relative to me.”</p><p>Hermione was silent for a moment, and then nodded. “Yeah.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say.</p><p>“What about you? Are you feeling okay about this?”</p><p>Hermione involuntarily shot a look at her sleeved arm. “Not really. But I’ll do my duty.”</p><p>“That’s all that’s required of us,” Dora smiled thinly. “Fortunately it became very easy after a boy died to save my life and I retreated to find my dead husband’s body laid out before me. Makes it easy, that does.”</p><p>“Alright. But that’s it? Our plan is to just – kill her, and let the rest sort itself out? That’s it? That’s the plan?” Hermione struck up a cigarette and looked north through the clearing. “That doesn’t seem like much of a plan at all.”</p><p>“It’s not.” Dora looked down. “It’s more like I’m not happy about the plan. We’re <em> not </em> supposed to kill her, Hermione. We’re supported to tell her the truth, which is that the Water of Life is on Ararat and taking the wand will do nothing to help her Lord. Optimally, we bring that news out via one of her subordinates, and we do knock her off. But if we have to, we let her go.”</p><p>Hermione jolted in shock, not really sure how she was feeling about that. “Why?”</p><p>“Because we want Voldemort himself to come. Bellatrix is the strongest and most skilled Witch or Wizard among the surviving Death Eaters, if she can’t do the job, then Voldemort will have to come himself. We want to lure him into making a major offensive into the rugged terrain of eastern Turkey and stepping away entirely from his other commitments and any kind of oversight of his Empire. We want him to invest entirely in this theatre, so we can launch more offensives elsewhere. The liberation of Norway and eastern China, for instance.”</p><p>“At the price of turning Turkey into a battlefield, and Georgia. Well,” She looked north. “Can’t help Georgia at the moment.”</p><p>“Also the liberation of all of the western CIS, and that means the recovery of our industrial base. If we know where Voldemort will be concentrating all of his attention, we might just launch major counterattacks all the way into Central Europe. And, of course, he hasn’t been to the front in years. This would be our chance to kill him again. And all while he’s obsessively chasing a mirage. Nobody knows how to get to Lake Anahit, or where it really is. So there you have it.”</p><p>Hermione thought about that for a moment. From the logic of a massive war of attrition, it made sense. Getting Voldemort to take personal command of the front would also have another advantage, call it the ‘Nicholas II’ problem from Russian experience. As a leader, Voldemort relied on being the invincible Dark Lord. He couldn’t be everywhere, and he couldn’t apparate the entire way across the Atlantic. Ilvermorny and the Magical Congress of the United States were only <em> tentatively </em> under his control. Battlefield defeats with Voldemort in personal command of the forces being defeated could easily lead to a massive defection of the wizards in the Americas from his forces, and that would let anti-Voldemort sentiment, which was very strong in North America’s wizarding community but suppressed by a totalitarian secret police apparatus at the moment, resurge and overthrow his reign in half the world. Nymphadora probably couldn’t say that out loud, but Hermione assumed she was definitely thinking it.</p><p>“No, we definitely want Bellatrix to survive,” Hermione finally said, with an uncomfortable reluctance at mouthing the words. “We want her to report back to Voldemort. Ideally, he kills her immediately after she does. But then he comes here. Even if he kills her for failure, though, he’s much more likely to believe her than basically anyone else who is alive right now. So we need to let Bellatrix go.”</p><p>“Are you comfortable with that, Hermione? You’re the one who was wounded by her the most.”</p><p>“No, Sirius was the one who was wounded the most by her,” Hermione shook her head sharply. “And he’s not here to be hurt by it. In fact, he’d understand perfectly. It’s just fishing, and we need some bait on the hook. Since that bait is the testament of one of Voldemort’s followers, we need one whose word he will actually rely on. Insomuch as Voldemort will trust anyone at all to have not been tricked, it will be Bellatrix. Trust me. I’ve got this. I understand why it’s important, Dora.”</p><p>“Thank you, Hermione.”</p><p>Hermione nodded, pulling off her helmet and stretching out in the sunrise, taking another drag on her cigarette and sitting in silence, until she saw the black image of a little speck in the sky from the west. “Think that’s Luna?”</p><p>“I hope so. She should be on time right about now, if it is.”</p><p>Hermione looked at her own watch and nodded. Then she watched the helicopter steadily approach, and finally line up for a landing. As it did, Zurab came out of his cabin and approached them.</p><p>“Senior Councillor,” he said more formally, having heard her rank from the Doctors. “I want to thank you for the checkup. I have a clean bill of health, I’m told.”</p><p>“I’m glad to hear,” Hermione answered automatically. “I encourage you to stay in your cabin, however. Military business.”</p><p>“Well, I heard that some of your officers had gone up into the hills.”</p><p>Hermione looked at him sharply. “Like I said. Military business. But what’s up there, if you follow the stream?”</p><p>“Ice Caves,” he grinned. “They’ll have a nice hike, but they’re very pretty.”</p><p>“Huh. Thank you, Mister Sologashvili, but I really need you to go inside.”</p><p>“Alright,” he sighed, and headed back to his cabin.</p><p>Hermione watched him for a moment, before turning her attention to Luna, who had arrived with seven more soldiers, presumably from her own protection squad and up to the carrying capacity of the Galina she arrived in. The eccentric blonde witch bounded over to her. “So this is it. The entryway to Chernosvyat,” she said, standing comfortably, and looking in the opposite direction as Hermione and Nymphadora, back toward the heights of the ridge.</p><p>“It might just be. How are you so sure?” Sometimes, Hermione had a limited tolerance for Luna Lovegood.</p><p>“Oh, it fits. The ridge would always keep it in the gloom, with the sun screened to the east and the south… And where the water is coming from.”</p><p>“The old man in the cabin, he doesn’t have any signs of any radiation sickness. We saw a Bowtruckle in the Willows, but the old man, he just says that there are ice caves up there,” Hermione answered.</p><p>But that made Luna’s eyes widen and her grin was absolutely triumphant. “Of course. That’s how Koschei did it, it was so obvious.”</p><p>Hermione felt that peculiar chill that she always did when Luna was about to be much too right for anything normal or sane. “Luna, how did Koschei do it?” She asked very deliberately, flashing a look to Dora.</p><p>“Well, the easiest way to transport water in ancient times would be as ice in a cart during winter, of course. Put it in an ice cave, and it will last forever, with just a little bit mixing into the rest of the melting ice each summer and giving water to the Golden Apple trees. Or the Willows, now. If there’s an ice cave, we have to be at Chernosvyat, so let’s go look for the entrance.”</p><p>Hermione felt a chill completely cover her body for a moment, and then she forced herself to her feet. Nymphadora had done the same. Suddenly, it all made sense, though in a Luna-esque way that made her glad she wasn’t Luna.</p><p>“We’ll take your squad and leave the rest on point duty, Luna.”</p><p>“Alright.” Luna gave the orders herself and then caught up with them, as Hermione first asked Captain Golovin to tell Vasya, and then started following the creek up into the woods with a growing excitement. Luna and her seven soldiers soon caught up with them.</p><p>As they advanced into the thick of the woods along the gently running rivulet, Hermione swore that she could tell the trees in its vicinity were older and larger. Ahead, they had to be slightly above the eleven hundred metre line on the ridge, which in these mountains was surely enough for ice caves. The footing in the snow as rough, and the going was slow, but with the help of a hiking stick, she felt comfortable.</p><p>Then she felt it. “<em>Merlin,</em>” she muttered and leaned against a tree, grabbing at her arm impulsively. The moment she did, though, the thought went through her brain like an electric shock.</p><p>“Be ready for action,” Dora ordered the protection squad. Luna raised her wand.</p><p>Oh yeah, Hermione knew exactly what it was. She knew that the word carved into her skin must be glowing like the Dark Mark. And that meant…</p><p><em> Bellatrix is here. </em> She forced herself to her feet. “Ginny and Larissa are in danger, come on!” With that, she was on the heels of her friends as she sheepishly realised that, trusting that she was already, they had already started, while the squad fanned out. Pounding up through the woods, the snow, they all knew that they couldn’t waste even a second.</p><p>They came across some of the men from one of the other protection squads, or rather, what was left of them, a single mangled corpse in the snow, still warm. A spell flared across the darkened gloom toward the cave; a shield blocked it, and from the colour and flare, Hermione knew that at least Larissa was still alive and defending herself.</p><p>They made hand-signs, they didn’t talk, trying to get the jump on Bellatrix and her group. Hermione thought she saw a glimpse of the woman but she couldn’t be quite sure. And then Nymphadora lunged out from cover. Her wand was hungry and…</p><p>“<em>Avada kedavra!” </em> Nymphadora spoke the killing words, and Hermione watched in slow motion shock as one of the wizards supporting Bellatrix dropped, struck by it, killed in a flash of hideous green magical energy.</p><p><em> Merlin she used it. God, she used it. Dora used … it. </em> She stood there in shock for a moment and didn’t raise her wand. She knew. Somewhere, she knew, intellectually, that just like in Barty Crouch Snr’s days in the First Wizarding War, Nymphadora was a trained Auror and the Ministry of Witchcraft had authorised them to use the Three Unforgivables, as the Russian Wizards called them, for the duration of the War. The State Security services thought nothing was beneath them for the sake of victory. But five years of war had changed Nymphadora Tonks, the death of her husband had changed Nymphadora Tonks, the death of the teenager who had given his life to save her’s changed Nymphadora Tonks. Now Dora was the kind of person who would actually use that authority, and use it without hesitation.</p><p>That moment was all that Bellatrix needed. Hermione saw her clearly as she lunged forward and levelled her wand, too late. She saw Bellatrix spinning around, away from the entrance to the ice cave. For a moment, the two of them were facing each other. They were looking at each other. Gray eyes, brown eyes. One against the other. The first time in four and a half years. The sunlight dampened out through the trees, the snow muffling the sound of battle. <em> Bellatrix. </em></p><p>And then she seemed to waver, and disappeared, like she was slipping between two two-dimensional images. It was like nothing that Hermione had ever seen before. It was not disapparating. Her followers hastened after her in the same way, and Hermione charged in. “Call for reinforcements,” she was shouting to the squad. “Larissa, Ginny…!?”</p><p>“Cruciatus curse,” Larissa answered a moment later with a shout.</p><p>Hermione spun back. “Detail two men to get Ginny down to the Doctors, at the double!” Then she turned around and caught her footing again, water splashing against her boots, forgotten in the moment even though it might be valuable enough to kill for. Might have literally been valuable enough to kill for. Might make Voldemort raise entire armies to seize it. But it was just a detail, a muffled sound of splashing, as she made haste.</p><p>Larissa, scrambling out of the cave, fell in behind them, and Hermione went first, raising a shield as she felt a twisting in her gut. The twisting relieved itself as she lunged to the side. Her shield deflected the first curse. But in the gloom, in the strange light in the sky, both sides had difficulty finding each other.</p><p>It was <em> huge. </em> There were <em> trees </em> everywhere. Life! And the sun appeared in the sky, but barely. Hermione realised this was the highest kind of magic which had been used to hide Chernosvyat. It was vast, and it had actually been removed from the map, in a physical way, Reality itself had been folded over Chernosvyat. She could see ghostly images of the land <em> above, </em> that was what was shrouding the sun from being fully visible!</p><p><em> My God, it’s amazing. </em> She crouched low, and used the gloom for cover.</p><p>Bellatrix’s team was looking for her, looking for her entire little group. But not for long. “Come on, we lack nothing!” A voice called, lazy, imperious, confident, sultry. Bellatrix. It was something Hermione herself might have said, and she stiffened at the first time she had heard that voice, in all that it meant. Sirius Black, dead. In her arm, hurting.</p><p>“<em>Bitch,</em>” Hermione snarled softly under her breath. An errant curse was sent their way in response by one of Bellatrix’s wizards, but it came nowhere close in the uncertain light. Hermione wondered why, for a moment, their enemies were not magically illuminating to find them, but as she looked to Dora, she saw that Dora was magically illuminating to try and find Bellatrix and her Wizards, but it was doing almost nothing. The gloom in Chernosvyat was unnatural and possessive.</p><p>Larissa swung her AKM off her shoulder and tapped on the laser sight she had attached to it. That, too, faded into the gloom. With a muffled curse, she deactivated it and slung it again. “Well, we follow them and try to get closer, right?”</p><p>“I think it’s four on seven,” Dora warned her. “But yeah, we haven’t got a choice.”</p><p>“Yes, Ginny got one before she went down to the Cruciatus,” Larissa said. “Seven. I’m sure she’ll be okay,” she quickly added to Hermione.</p><p>“Except for Bellatrix, they’re all goons,” Hermione shrugged grimly, and didn’t answer that comment of Larissa’s. Ginny <em> would </em> be fine, but she was also in pain. Her best friend . “We’ll do it.” She started forward, the dim sun providing the only direction for them to follow. The ground opened up from the entrance to Chernosvyat, and seemed to stretch on without end. But it was not without end. Ahead, they could see a dim black mass rising above the trees.</p><p>The snow had passed through the barrier, but only in a limited dusting, an imperfect coverage of the ground. That left splotchy places of dead and built up fallen tree trunks and leaves, with lichens and moss growing. There were running streams and pooling water in place to place. It might have been an estate once, but it was overgrown and abandoned now. Or perhaps it had always been this malicious and dank.</p><p>It was, after all, the home of Koschei the Deathless.</p><p>With their wands out and ready, the group of four witches pressed on toward a great turreted Palace. It looked far more stereotypically Islamic than Russian, Hermione realised as the black shadow of the place slowly resolved from indistinct form into a more certain shape of a building, an immense palace and all of its outbuildings too, with a large lake in the middle.</p><p>“This place has to be thousands of Hectares, hidden from sight, from satellite, from entry unless you hit the exact spot,” Larissa murmured. She saw, through the darkness of Koschei's lands, what even looked like a herd of cattle, which lived under the canopy of shadow for their whole lives.</p><p>“Yeah.” Dora paused for a minute. “We could run into them at any minute without realising it. Hand signals only from here on out.”</p><p>“Concur,” Hermione answered, clipped, terse, and immediately stopped talking. That was it, then, they advanced toward the shore of the lake in tense silence, their wands ready.</p><p>Then the Palace of Chernosvyat lit up before them. Starting from the doorway, red, eerie light, the red light of a submarine at combat stations, began to pour from every window, spreading around the Palace. Disappearing quickly into the blackness, the combination of red over the gloom of black created the fading intensity of black-light, the strange not-quite-light, which gave Chernosvyat its name.</p><p>From across the lake, Hermione could very clearly hear an Englishwoman’s voice shout “Fuck!”</p><p>It made her grin. <em> I don’t think the Death Eater was expecting Koschei the Deathless’ houselights to come on automatically for her </em> , she thought, and then signalled for them to advance now that the red light in the black gloom gave them enough to see by and advance toward the Palace at a quick and steady rate.</p><p>They had to pad around the lake, and by that point, as they reached the doors, Bellatrix had clearly left a guard behind. Not just any guard, either. The palace was reasonably fortified, so rather sensibly, she had put four Wizards at the great, iron-bossed wooden door as the only easy place to gain entry.</p><p>Making hand signals, Hermione sent Dora to the left and Luna to the right to distract them. They unleashed duelling curses which cancelled each other in front of the doors, making it look like a frontal attack, so that a team of two of Bellatrix’s wizards burst out, expecting to see their opposition attacking them frontally. Instead, their counter-attacks went harmlessly if dramatically into the woods…</p><p>And they were taken down by Dora and Luna with their next wave of spell-casting. As they fell, Hermione made a quick signal and with Larissa at her side, the two them charged the door. Presenting an easy target, they were also shielding, and Bellatrix’s two remaining defenders at the door suddenly found themselves outnumbered as, trying to get into position to attack Hermione and Larissa, they found themselves driving back by a crossfire from Dora and Luna. It wasn’t enough to kill the two Wizards they were fighting, but it was enough to drive them away from the entry hall, and let the team gain access.</p><p>Wary of using magic which might damage Koschei’s palace, Hermione lobbed a grenade after them, and then set a couple of smoke grenades to confuse them on the right direction to throw it back as they dashed on. The explosion happened as the grenade was magically deflected, but they were shielding, too, and it did nothing. But what it did to was creating a situation so confusing and chaotic that the team of four witches pushed past them and deeper into the house. They were lost to the two remaining defenders, and now Bellatrix’s team—herself and two more Wizards if the count was like—was separated from the other two.</p><p>The odds were looking much better, but it was still Bellatrix Lestrange.</p><p>Taking no chances, Hermione brought them to a halt and cast a spell to hide their conversation. “All right. Do we have any idea where it is?”</p><p>“No, not but absolutely no splitting up,” Larissa muttered. “I know what happens in horror movies.”</p><p>Hermione wondered for a moment if despite every single source saying that Koschei the Deathless was now, in fact, dead, that he was really alive. That really <em> would </em> be a horror movie, though hopefully he would be angrier at Bellatrix for busting into the house. But from the rotted furnishings and the decrepit state of the land, Hermione was reasonably convinced that was not a concern… Not convinced enough to split up, though! Particularly since it didn’t make tactical sense, anyway.</p><p>“There’s almost certainly some kind of audience chamber following the central hall, so we’ll try to pick that back up, and no, we’re not splitting up,” Hermione agreed. “That’s the first place, and if not there, we need to look for some spell or potion room, or something like that.”</p><p>With that, they pressed on, Hermione remembering how they had come in, and making turns at right angles to it until they reached the grand hall. Glancing again to the right, she confirmed that the two Wizards they had bypassed were at least not waiting in ambuscade already, and then they turned left and ran under the redlights.</p><p>Ahead was a great set of ornately carved doors with what looked like Islamic calligraphy on them. She realised it was a set of Distiches, couplets in traditional Persian literary style. “Larissa…?” She knew her friend could read Farsi.</p><p>“<em>When the Writing of Destiny is encountered </em></p><p>
  <em> All scheming and hope fail before Fate </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Allah has commanded the way to Anahit </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Fall silent before the blows of the Faithful </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Immortality is mine alone to claim forever </em>
</p><p>
  <em> For I, fair supplicant, grasped the prize </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Before the appointed hour of Fate </em>
</p><p>
  <em> When the road to immortality closed </em>
</p><p>
  <em> The difference between you and I is but </em>
</p><p>
  <em> The difference which Fate hath decreed </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Thus, supplicant, know my favours kind </em>
</p><p><em> and </em> <em> Know, too, that I hold no regre</em><em>t.</em><em>” </em></p><p>Hermione shivered. She couldn’t imagine another thing in the world that was appropriate, and for a moment, the impulse and the needs of battle slipped away in favour of thinking about the incredible place in which they had just found themselves, and she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help but quote it.</p><p>
  <em>“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”</em>
</p><p>Tensely, they moved to push past the doors. As they did, they realised they had lucked out; Bellatrix had chosen to look somewhere else first. They had arrived alone.</p><p>And then Larissa sucked in her breath, and Hermione turned, and realized that they were not alone.</p><p>A skeleton lay mouldering on the divan, in half-rotted robes of what had once been great finery, with a sword fallen across his body, a shamshir with the scabbard half-rotted. And a huge wooden wand, of exactly the style that Master Flyorov had said, with golden rings and ruby signets dropped to the floor in dust, where they had fallen from fingers no longer holding flesh.</p><p>The mortal remains of Koschei the Deathless, where Marya Morevna and Ivan Tsarevitch had put an end to him.</p><p>Hermione walked forward, trembling. And then a voice called out to her, and she was brought at once to a halt, spinning sharply toward the doors.</p><p>“Well, well, Muddy, it’s been a long time…” Bellatrix began, only to trail off as she, too, saw what lay on the divan. Her voice changed from mocking to sharp ferocity. “Get away. Mudblood shouldn’t even be near the <em> Rabdos </em> of Koschei the Deathless.”</p><p>“Really?” Hermione answered with a sudden flare of anger as she levelled her wand, and she directed five years of agony into what was probably the best comeback she’d ever made in her life. “I think that from the Distiches on the door that Koschei would be amused that a mudblood used his wand to take out the woman who broke into his house and his tomb. Want to take a chance with fate?”</p><p>Bellatrix trembled with cold rage, but in the red light of the audience hall, she seemed to see more clearly that she was no longer dealing with the girl who she had mutilated. A strange look crossed her features, as if after four and a half years, she was shocked by the hard military air of her former victim. And then she tossed her head back and laughed.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Lake Anahit -- As was explained earlier, in Armenian mythology the Goddess Anahit (Iranian Anahita) was associated with a lake at the top of Mount Ararat, but what "The Mountains of Ararat" are is subject to considerable debate in historiography.<br/>'Nicholas II problem' -- the idea that a leader can suffer a catastrophic loss of respect if they become personally responsible for large scale military catastrophes and failures. This was a contributing factor in the Russian revolution (though hardly the only one, as these factors began with decisions made during the mobilisation in WWI).<br/>"Barty Crouch Snr's days" -- during the First Wizarding War, the unforgivables were permitted for Aurors to use against Voldemort's forces. So it is the same here, under the authority of the State Security services.<br/>Red lights -- The lights of Koschei's house being red duplicates the way it is presented in many Russian fairytale illustrations.<br/>Distich -- a rhyming couplet, common in Iranian and Iranian inspired literature. I did not attempt to capture the rhyme in "translation"; they are original.<br/>Shamshir -- a double-edged but curved Iranian sword.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. The Rabdos of Koschei</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Nine: The Rabdos of Koschei</p><p> </p><p>“My my, it’s just like the old gang is still here.” Bellatrix smirked, holding her wand at the ready as two wizards came up on either side of her in support. Four on three, they stood in a standoff across the audience hall. “Mudbloods, Halfbloods, traitors…” Bellatrix seemed to take her time assessing them. “To be honest, I’m surprised the Russians let you do so much,” she continued, ignoring Larissa and focusing on the other three. “Once a traitor, always a traitor. They’ll never trust you. That’s the way they operate here.” She winked to Larissa. “Tell them the truth?”</p><p>“Those who have bled with us are our comrades,” Larissa countered smoothly, speaking in accented but precise English. “I do not need to justify anything to a Death Eater. They’re here because they’re the right people for the job.”</p><p>Shifting her position to the left, slowly, through the shadows… Bellatrix was not waiting, either. “Want to talk about your failures, Muddy?” She continued, idly. “Tell your Russian friend about all the times you couldn’t stop us? All the chances to keep half her country from going up in smoke that you missed? Or possibly something more personal? You can feel it on your arm, can’t you?” Her voice dropped to a husky whisper. “You can feel…. Me.”</p><p>“A Naryshkina has no need to listen to your gutter garbage,” Larissa sneered, and shifted position to behind Koschei’s divan, her wand ready. “You don’t even have a name to us. We just call you ‘Crooked Wand’. It will be the closest thing to an epithet that you will get when we have finished you today.”</p><p>Hermione shifted too. She couldn’t help but smile a little at that one. Larissa was always so composed. She had never gotten comfortable with that wand, anyway. It had not taken easily to her attempts to use it.</p><p>“Well let me assure you that a fucking Black doesn’t care about your fake blood purity. You’re all muggle-fuckers who pretended it didn’t matter because they had a lot of money. If you’re so obsessed with what my wand looks like, maybe I should stuff it up your twat.” She tossed a glance, mock-coyness laced in her expression, toward Hermione. “I do owe you, on the other hand, for taking good care of my wand. I was happy to have it back when you ran away from Hogwarts like a coward after we killed Potter.”</p><p>“You know, Hermione doesn’t actually want to have this conversation right now,” Luna abruptly interjected. “Maybe we should focus on something else.”</p><p>Hermione had been glancing around, and in the gloom, she saw Dora’s hand resting at a funny angle behind her back. <em>What’s she up to? </em>She wondered, keeping her eyes on Bellatrix.</p><p>Suddenly, there was a flash of light and a thundering report in the room. A <em>gunshot. </em>Nobody had a gun out, everyone had their wand at the ready, and the bullet—headed straight up. Dora had fired her gun with it strapped to her back, facing up, her wand still at the ready.</p><p>The gunshot made Bellatrix whip around to focus on Dora with an abruptly flung curse from instinct, but Dora was ready for it with a shielding spell, the intentionally errant gunshot having done its job. Hermione wasted no time processing the clever little surprise and she took full advantage of it. “<em>Expelliarmus</em>!” A quick snapped gesture, and she struck one of the Wizards with Bellatrix square on, his wand flying violently away from him to disappear in the gloom of the audience hall.</p><p>Luna had taken the second, and Bellatrix was alone. A flurry of spells was being exchanged with lethal intent between Bellatrix and Nymphadora across the divan of Koschei, and then in an amazing display of talent, Bellatrix managed to shield them, spin, deliver her own <em>Expelliarmus </em>to disarm Luna, and come back in time to defend herself from Nymphadora again.</p><p>And Hermione, who joined in trying to direct spells in the duel against Bellatrix. <em>Where the hell are you, Larissa…</em>?</p><p>Suddenly Larissa emerged from behind the divan, her wand already in motion, and Hermione heard it.</p><p>“<em>Avada</em>…”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes flared open. <em>Larissa doesn’t know about the plan. </em> She turned an <em>Expelliarmus </em>to the right—and disarmed her own friend. The shocked look from Larissa as her wand flew away from her was matched only by the expression on Bellatrix’s face, and she barely turned away the next attack from Dora.</p><p>With Hermione’s wand now levelled at her in support of Dora, and the situation so confusing, the fighting abruptly stopped. The standoff resumed.</p><p>That was combat. Seconds or minutes of brutal intensity after waiting. And then when it was over, unless it was utterly decisive, and that was not often, silence and waiting again. That was enough to drive some people mad. But now it was Dora and Hermione on Bellatrix, so it had probably be worth it.</p><p>Grimacing, Hermione shifted to the side, keeping herself at the ready. She approached Larissa and extended her hand. Her friend took it, but she also cursed. “Hermione Alanovna, what the fuck just happened? You don’t make mistakes like that.” Her voice held a hint of accusation, reflected in the formality mixed with cursing that she used.</p><p>“Mudblood seems to want me alive,” Bellatrix smirked. “Or she hasn’t earned that uniform. I’m not really sure which…”</p><p>“It’s not that I want you alive, but that I find it useful to keep you alive,” Hermione answered as she hauled her friend up to her feet.</p><p>Larissa stared at her weirdly for the comment. Unarmed, she was out of the fight unless she found her wand. So was Luna. So were Bellatrix’s two goons. The only way to change that would be to give them a chance to find their wands, which meant penetrating the gloom of the room. The first person to cast a spell to overcome the unnatural gloom of Chernosvyat… Would let them <em>all </em>go for their wands at once, and it would likely get very deadly, very fast.</p><p>It became so quiet that they could hear each other breathing.</p><p>“I’m not really sure what the stand-off gains you,” Bellatrix tried pacing slightly, though neither Hermione or Dora’s wands wavered, her voice conversational and bemused. “The rest of my lads will be along shortly, and you have, what, a Weasel and some muggles outside? And the last time I checked, the Weasel was writhing in pain… What’s that house witch mother of her’s up to, anyway? Butchering hogs in a market? I wager she looks like a babushka by now…”</p><p>Larissa began to slip back into the shadows.</p><p>Bellatrix turned and flung a spell for her that Hermione barely interposed a counter to. Larissa reversed herself, lunging forward as she brought her rifle up, probably her aim all along, but in the shadows instead of forced in the open and under the red light. Dora, without blinking, unleashed spell after spell, light in colours of red and blue and yellow and green alternating in contrasts and merging with the lights above, in the strange colouration of Chernosvyat.</p><p>Bellatrix turned the attacks against her with the effortless grace of her skill, reminding those facing her that she was one of the finest magical duellists alive and eager to prove it, and advanced, covering herself against Hermione and Dora both, and raising a shield that left bullets spattering and ricocheting into the ancient wood and rotted tapestries of the walls of Koschei’s audience hall. Her wand movements showed a level of precision which had been lacking five years ago, and Hermione was shocked by it. Bellatrix had recovered considerably from her time in Azkaban, despite the continued deranged appearance and rotted teeth.</p><p>The duel was clearly a stalemate, and without the exchange of words but with a simple kind of consensus which develops in those situations, the attacks tapered off into yet another silence. “Just let me take it,” Bellatrix said.</p><p>“No,” Larissa answered for them, rising from the floor with her rifle in her hand, wiping blood from her mouth. She had been injured by one of the spells Bellatrix had connected with her.</p><p>“And what’s the point? It won’t change whether or not you win this stupid little war. It’s just a personal interest.”</p><p>“Because we’re Russians, and we’re not inclined to give our enemies what they want.” Larissa wiped the dripping blood from her mouth, a ghastly smile on her lips, and extended her hand. There was a rattling, and an object flung through the air toward her.</p><p>Bellatrix snarled and cried out “<em>Avada Kedavra!</em>”</p><p>But Larissa was already moving, flinging herself into the wand moving toward her. She caught it with her hand and rolled on the floor, and the spell impacted with the wall in an explosion of old, dry, dead wood instead. Two spells converged on her from Hermione and Dora as Hermione had no time to ask her friend questions about how, nonverbally and wandlessly, she had done it. No, it was a fight for her life, except, three on one, there was no doubt that Bellatrix was going to lose.</p><p>But her two subordinates that Hermione and her team had snuck past in the other part of the house arrived just in time to turn the tide again. It was almost brutal how it was the war in microcosm; if they had arrived before Larissa was armed, Bellatrix would have won. But now that Larissa had her wand back, it was three on three, and the fight was odds-even again.</p><p>Hermione thought fast. She knew Bellatrix would be ready for any attempt to help Luna regain her wand, and…</p><p>Suddenly, a gun barked in the murk, and barked again, as one of the disarmed younger wizards screamed, a neat red dot on his chest before he toppled. He had ended up helpless, but <em>Luna Lovegood, </em> armed with a rifle just like the other MinKol Witches, <em>hadn’t been. </em></p><p>“Well, that was an inelegant weapon for an uncivilised age!”</p><p>But Bellatrix was already taking advantage of it. Advancing behind swift shields she cast to keep pace with her, she lunged for Koschei’s corpse.</p><p>Hermione was the one close enough to lunge for it too, and try to stop her from reaching the Divan. Hermione reached for the <em>Rabdos, </em>but so did Bella. The two women fell to the ground, both of them grasping onto the massively long wand of Koschei the Deathless, at the skeletal feet of his corpse, in a cloud of dust as spells tore overhead.</p><p>“Dora…!” Hermione cried. She had an opening, Bellatrix couldn’t use her wand, and… She grabbed with both hands and yanked on the wooden rod of the <em>Rabdos. </em></p><p>But instead of Dora intervening to drive back or disable Bellatrix, she felt a kiss of something very cold pushing against her neck.</p><p>Bellatrix had used her free hand to grab Koschei’s <em>sword, </em>and now the scimitar was pressed up against her neck. “Sorry, Pet, but you’re not the only one who’s learned how to fight as dirty as a muggle. Might have come easier to you, mudblood, but you’re not the only one. Tonks, stand down or I give the muddy a second smile!”</p><p>“Let her go, Lestrange,” Dora answered coldly.</p><p>Bellatrix laughed, but cut off immediately when Dora continued: “Let her go, and at the same time, Hermione, let go of the <em>Rabdos. </em>Let Bellatrix have it.”</p><p>“Dora?!” Hermione had understood the plan involved letting Bellatrix go, but the idea of letting her go in <em>Triumph… </em></p><p>“The FSB is running this operation, not Stavka, and I have the authority. Lestrange, back away from her. Hermione, let go of the wand.”</p><p>For a moment, Bellatrix seemed as hesitant as Hermione was. The two women had their hands only inches apart on the <em>Rabdos. </em>Hermione could see Bellatrix’s chest heaving into the dusty stone floor of the palace, her breasts sandwiched between the stone and corset and her own body, with her tussled dark hair in a cascade of messy ringlets around her. Nobody would deny she was beautiful, and almost five years later, still was; well, at least until she opened her mouth.</p><p>Hermione lifted her hand from the <em>Rabdos, </em> and gingerly pushed herself away from Koschei’s skeleton, retrieving her own wand as she did. She watched Bellatrix, now fully in possession of the <em>Rabdos, </em> leave the sword at the feet of its Master, while taking the true prize, with an almost equal delicacy. To someone accustomed to the wands of the modern wizarding world, it seemed almost ridiculous that it was a rod several feet long, but it had <em>power, </em> none of them were doubting that. And none of them knew just how <em>much </em>power.</p><p>Bellatrix rose, her corset forcing her up to her full height as she stood. She regarded them coolly. “Well, with that, I’ll be leaving.”</p><p>“Not so fast,” Dora answered. “We’ve got to talk to you about what you’re going to bring to Voldemort.”</p><p>“Yeah, there’s some information he might find useful,” Hermione added, her eyes level. She found herself fighting her fear of Bellatrix, renewed by the sword to her neck only a moment before, but it was one fear among many she had learned to overcome. Still, the woman had more effect on her than being in main combat.</p><p>Bellatrix ignored her niece and glared at Hermione. “Have out with it.”</p><p>“The wand is useless. It’s made of the wood of a Golden Apple tree, and it’s certainly powerful,” Hermione grinned, “but it absolutely does not bring immortal life, nor is it important to it. I know that Voldemort,” she saw the flinch of Bellatrix’s, that the woman was incensed to hear the Dark Lord’s name being used in any way except respectfully, “is an absolute coward who is afraid to die, and who has also made his soul immortal… For as long as Nagini lives, anyway. We know all about that, Lestrange. We may have failed in killing her, but we <em>know.</em>”</p><p>“You will not speak of Him so!” Rage flashed in Bellatrix’s eyes.</p><p>“Be thankful we’re telling you,” Dora smirked drolly.</p><p>Hermione smiled tightly, not intending for it to be a kind gesture. “Anyway, the point is that the <em>Rabdos </em>is useless for what he intends, and we know what he intends. So you’re not going to get a reception that you like when you return to Britain.”</p><p>Dora stiffened faintly, but said nothing. Hermione’s smile faded for a moment, but she continued, levelly. “He would have to find the Water of Life, the water of Anahit, on the top of Mount Ararat. Just like the Distiches on the door to the audience hall imply. That’s where Koschei gained his immortality, and that’s why nobody followed him.”</p><p>Bellatrix stiffened like she was going to retreat to the door, and then shook her head. “A truce?” She looked at Hermione, intentionally ignoring Nymphadora. “A truce? I would read them for myself.”</p><p>“A truce,” Hermione agreed after a moment in which she whetted her lips and wondered if she could really believe this scene.</p><p>“Your word.” Bellatrix’s voice clipped flatly. She seemed completely unwilling to take the slightest chance.</p><p>“A truce, for fifteen minutes, on my word as a Russian officer,” Hermione answered.</p><p>“That will do. Starting… Now.” Bellatrix marked the time on a NATO military issue chronometer, which surprised Hermione, as she would have never imagined the Pureblood to be using an artefact of a muggle military.</p><p>With that, Bellatrix turned back and stepped out, to face the doors. Unable to resist, she tried using the <em>Rabdos </em>to cast the spell to translate the Distiches, since she could not read classical Persian in flowing Arabic script herself. It resisted her, and strongly, such that the magic failed the first time. But the Greatest Witch of Her Age could not be deterred, and on the second attempt, compelled the words to rearrange into English, and read the Distiches.</p><p>As she did, Hermione made her way to Larissa’s side, where Luna was supporting her, having pulled open her uniform jacket and blouse and applying bandages to a bloody wound.</p><p>“Sectumsempra,” Luna explained, “it was so bad she was torn up on the inside, too.”</p><p>Glassy-eyed Larissa winked to her, and Hermione for a moment was aghast, but she had seen people manage to function through truly terrifying wounds now, and accepted it. But it did not bode well…</p><p>“I used her wand to perform <em>Ferula,</em>” Luna continued. “And though that’s helped, the internal injuries mean she could still go into shock soon; we don’t have much time. But we have a healer and a doctor very close by… You and Dora have some kind of secret plan,” she added, matter-of-factly.</p><p>“We do,” Hermione agreed, and gingerly gave her friend a hug. “I am <em>really sorry, </em>Larissa.”</p><p>“It’s alright,” she laughed through her pain. “I wish I’d known about this plan.”</p><p>“Dora only told me about it this morning,” Hermione answered. “You know how it is.”</p><p>“Chekists,” Larissa agreed, and grinned that kind of hysterical grin of someone in pain.</p><p>Hermione’s curiosity was too much to bear, though. She had to ask. “Larissa… How did you get your wand back?”</p><p>“Blood,” Larissa answered. “I used my own blood to empower the spell so I could cast it without a wand. It’s taught in the Black Court at Koldovstoretz.”</p><p>“That’s a Dark Art,” Hermione murmured, feeling overwhelmed and stressed by the display of both of her friends trying to use the killing curse—Dora successfully—and now also Larissa having used her own blood to empower magic.</p><p>“The classification assumes that the practitioner is using someone <em>else</em>’s blood,” Larissa noted, as Hermione distinctly remembered now the moment when Larissa had wiped the blood from her mouth with her wand-hand. “For a wounded witch, you might as well make something powerful out of that which your body is already giving up to the dirt. It might be that thing which lets you hang on for one second longer, so you’re the one who is the hero instead of the corpse.” She forced herself to speak, the concentration helping return a spark to her blue eyes.</p><p>Hermione nodded and squeezed Larissa’s shoulder. “Hang in there, Larissa Sergeivna. Please.”</p><p>“Planning on it,” Larissa answered, dark, drying blood making her smile look so uncomfortable. “Could we just get on with the fight before I’m too weak to participate?”</p><p>“We’ve got a plan, don’t worry.” Hermione just smiled, offered the reassuring words, and rose.</p><p>Bellatrix had read the words on the doors, and then she had read them a second time… And maybe a third. Then she undid the spell, and walked back into the audience room, arms behind her back, that dragon-skin corset marking her like nothing else in this strange environment.</p><p>“You told the truth,” she acknowledged, her voice inscrutable but subdued in tone. “However, it says nothing about the <em>Rabdos.” </em>Then she swung it through the air, and her command summoned a brilliant light from the tip of the old wand of Koschei, which finally dispelled the gloom in the audience hall. As it did, the roof of the audience hall <em>gleamed. </em>It was massy silver, set with rubies, and though it had taken some damage over the years—most recently to the bullet which Dora had delivered to it so that she could startle Bellatrix at the start of the fight—it was amazing, like red stars set in a silver sky.</p><p>“It could still be sufficient for my Master’s needs, and that is for Him to judge, not you, mudblood.” she concluded, a hint of imperious triumph leaching into her words at how she had become to master Koschei’s <em>Rabdos. </em></p><p>Luna pulled away from Larissa long enough to retrieve her wand, now visible where it had fallen on the floor, and the disarmed enemy wizard did the same, both wary of each other but taking advantage of this moment which would make it four on four—but with Larissa badly wounded.</p><p>Then a cackle echoed through the room, and every pair of eyes whipped in a horrifyingly unexpected direction.</p><p>To Hermione the voice spoke English, to Luna, to Nymphadora and Bellatrix. To Larissa it spoke Russian, and to some of Bellatrix’s wizards, German or French. Black pits of unnatural light gleamed in the eye-sockets of Koschei’s skull.</p><p>“I am long dead from this world, and truly Fate decreed the low to become high, and the high to become low,” the ghostly voice echoed, though it was no ghost.</p><p>Hermione could see Luna nervously, quickly working some magic and relaxing. The eccentric blonde stepped back toward her, her voice dropping to a whisper. “He enchanted his own body like a picture.”</p><p>“Now you know that immortality was taken from me, but I will tell you, you will not find it here, or else you would also not live to trespass in my Chernosvyat! If you want it, you must find the road that the unbelievers built, and that Umar destroyed. Take my wand, but you will gain nothing from it but bitter tears.”</p><p>Bellatrix had a furiously chastened look on her face as the skeleton ceased to speak and the black-light eye-sockets returned to simple empty holes in the skull of a dead man who had written his name as a black legend across half Eurasia. Then she shook her head, checked her chrono, and looked up at Hermione. “Almost out of time, mudblood. What do you want to do?” There was a pained smile. “We can fight, or I can walk away with the <em>Rabdos.</em>”</p><p>“It’s not quite time yet,” Hermione answered, and padded over to Nymphadora, once again casting <em>Muffliato. </em>“Do we let her go with the <em>Rabdos, </em>then? It seems like, uhm, Koschei almost wanted to help us.”</p><p>“It was very useful,” Dora agreed in a whisper. “Yes, by just letting her go with the wand but forcing her to tell him it’s useless…”</p><p>“She’s very good at Occlumens, she might hide it,” Hermione ventured suspiciously. She did not want to count on Bellatrix Lestrange doing something useful for her however likely it might in fact be.</p><p>“That assumes she’d be trying to hide it and that Voldemort would be trying to find it in her. On the contrary, having met his instructions, I think she would just tell him the truth about all of this and he’d know that what he himself had originally wanted was insufficient. Then he would have to plan on coming for himself and looking for the Lake of Anahit. With the wand, she has no reason to fear execution…”</p><p>“She <em>might </em>if Voldemort finds out it’s useless,” Hermione mused. A part of her wanted Bellatrix to be executed by Voldemort, it would be a very ironic way for her to die, <em>though he’s so awful that he might even find a way to make me feel sympathetic for Bellatrix. </em>There was Lucius Malfoy’s death, after all. Hermione wanted to cringe just thinking about it. Even with the pain in her arm reminding her of what Bellatrix had done to her, she was suddenly aware of the fact that she didn’t want Bellatrix to suffer the same fate as Lucius Malfoy, and she hoped that meant she was a good person. It was even mildly reassuring.</p><p>“Regardless, it seems like a serviceable backup plan, so…”</p><p>“Mudblood, Tonks, out of time!” Bellatrix shouted, a sneering grin returning to her face. “Quit chattering and let me know whether or not you’ll fight or let us leave unmolested.”</p><p>Hermione cast a spell to end the <em>Muffliato, </em>and the two women turned to face the elder woman was respectively their tormentor and their aunt. “We’ll let you and your men go, Lestrange,” Hermione answered. “Go on. Get out of here. You’ve got what you came for.”</p><p>“Your word?” Bellatrix asked as before.</p><p>“You will get none. It wouldn’t change anything.”</p><p>“You’re right, I wouldn’t take the word of a mudblood seriously anyway,” Bellatrix giggled, even though she had done just that minutes before—the woman was mad—and began to back up. “Withdraw. We have met the Dark Lord’s objective,” she instructed to her remaining wizards. One of them, in a reminder that the enemy was human, cast a feather-light spell on the body of their fallen comrade that Luna had slain with her rifle, and carried him silently away.</p><p>As they retreated, the gloom reclaimed Chernosvyat’s audience Hall.</p><p>“Well.” Larissa was breathing hard as she stepped forward. “I’ll understand the point of why we just let her get away… Someday. Can I see a doctor, please?”</p><p>“If only we could apparate,” Hermione cursed as she went to her friend’s side. Luna cast feather-weight on Larissa, too, and Hermione picked her up in her arms and, nodding to the other two witches with her, they began to follow Bellatrix and her team out at a respectful and cautious distance, knowing that otherwise hostilities would resume. But for Hermione, all she wanted to do was get her friend to the Doctors, the mission had concluded. She just cursed the fact that like so many others, she wouldn’t actually know if it had succeeded until months later.</p><p>After they left Chernosvyat and began to trudge through the dark woods, though, the believe that everything was over quickly came to an end. Ahead, there was a shout in English, others in Russian, and a burst of fire. Hermione’s eyes widened and her face set tensely. <em>Ginny! </em></p><p>Of course her friend would be brave enough to, less than an hour after suffering from the Cruciatus curse, lead troops into Chernosvyat as reinforcements. And of course, they had just run into Bellatrix, with one witch to cover against four. With a look of fear, especially for Vasya, Hermione sat her friend down and began to run. “Come on, we’ve got to stop them!”</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Blood magic -- Larissa uses the blood she is coughing up as a focus for her to recover her wand when she is not holding it; the Black Court at Koldovstoretz teaches esoterica, and this includes what could be seen as dark magic like blood magic, but Larissa argues it is not dark magic because it is her own blood, freely given from her wounds. In the most ancient times freely given blood was held to have great power. <br/>Koschei's speech -- that on his death he enchanted himself to leave a message for those who would find him.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. War Without End</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter 10: War Without End</p><p> </p><p>Ginny had pulled herself back together after suffering disarming and torture in record time. Motivated to overcome the pain, for the sake of her friends, there had been no stopping her. She pulled together an understrength platoon of twenty-three soldiers, and based on the directions from those who had seen it happen, pushed their way into the entrance to Chernosvyat.</p><p>They made haste, hearing nothing, and barely seeing anything. The whole of the force only had a single set of night vision goggles, as they were one of those items not easily replaced in the aftermath of a nuclear war. They did nothing in particular to help. Ginny brought forth light from her wand, but the wards around Chernosvyat seemed hungry to consume it. Ahead, faint red lights glowed dimly through the woods, and that had, at least, provided a natural objective for them.</p><p>Then, blinking against the backlight, they saw movement. They could tell by the way the faint red light dipped, and then returned, as people were walking in front of it. The veteran soldiers made hand signals and alerted Ginny by passing the message from man to man due to the poor visibility. A veteran by now herself, she immediately stood ready, and acknowledged them.</p><p>Grabbing mouthfuls of snow from the mouldering ground of Chernosvyat, they stuffed it in their mouths to hide their breath, and fanned out in a moon-shaped semicircle where Ginny could still cover them from the middle, as she cautiously dropped to her knees, wand in hand.</p><p>Raising their rifles, safeties off, the moment hung in absolute tension. If they knew, if they <em> absolutely knew, </em> that it was the enemy over there who was approaching them, they would open fire. If the wizards and witches were not ready to cast <em> Protego, </em> if the first ripple of automatic fire that tore through the darkness was completely unexpected, then they would drop like any other mortal. Any living being would die with a bullet through the brain or heart.</p><p>The <em> problem </em> was that they were hesitating lest they create a case of ‘friendly fire’. If the enemy had no similar detached groups to Ginny’s <em> friends </em> who were somewhere down there… Or for reasons of expediency, they simply didn’t <em> care… </em> Then they could still get the drop on Ginny’s platoon. After all, if she gave the order to fire now, Hermione or Dora might be dead in a heartbeat.</p><p>If she couldn’t tell who they were, fast, it would be a disaster.</p><p>Ginny hadn’t been able to apparate <em> into </em> Chernosvyat, but she wondered if she could apparate from point to point inside of Chernosvyat, as an idea, an image of reckless daring, seized her heart. She flashed the hand signal for <em> close quarters battle </em> to Vasya.</p><p>She could feel his gaze on her, but she had already made up her mind. He would have to trust that the wizards knew what they doing. There was no time, and no way, to explain in the silence of an ambush. And she would have to have absolute faith in their aim.</p><p>Ginny fixed the image of the advancing figures firmly, and tried to apparate right behind the leader.</p><p>She flashed into position, her wand ready to illuminate. <em> Apparation, successful! </em> But her mind cheered for only a minute. Even in the dim, uncertain light, she could see the silhouette of <em> that corset. </em> Bellatrix.</p><p>She raised her wand high. <em> “Lumos!” </em></p><p>The moment her light appeared, the men adjusted their aim to make sure they wouldn’t hit their commander, and then pressed their triggers. It was an eternity in the space of a heartbeat. But their aim would necessarily be thrown off by the light, with their eyes adapted to the darkness; there was no other way, however, to make the signal with what she had done. But she had nonetheless given them a chance to get in the first shot. That was what her men wanted and what they counted on. They took risks and devoted their lives to that first shot, knowing that against Wizards they were unlikely to get a second.</p><p>“<em>Petrificus Totalus!” </em> Bellatrix’s voice screamed with power, raged and boiled over a Ginny who had been focused on warning and ordering her men. Ginny felt the power constrict around her, and tried to raise a ward against it.</p><p>Bellatrix had already spun back, and in the sweeping arc, completed the move that her wand demanded. “<em>Protego</em>!” Power swept around her, and more than around her, as bullets were deflected in wild and crazy angles in the night from her and her men. In speed, skill, and power, there was no comparison.</p><p>There was a moment where Ginny just managed to complete the ward against <em> Petrificus Totalus </em> when she felt that she could salvage the situation. She escaped the encroaching power of the inability to move, and brought her wand to attack. Ginny managed to escape petrification and begin her counterattack, only to again face “<em>Protego</em>!” as Bellatrix deftly turned from gun to spell and blocked both, and then again blocked both. She was <em> so fast, </em> and <em> so skilled. </em> For Ginny it was demoralising, but she held her position, gave her ground slowly, and blocked the counterattacks as they came, while around her, her soldiers fell back, firing steadily, rather than be overcome by the other Wizards with Bellatrix.</p><p>Ginny could do nothing except block, she was on the verge of being overwhelmed by numbers. Weaving blocks from her wand, she turned to physicality. She was at point-blank range to Bellatrix, and it was not part of a proper duel, but this was a fight to survive. Marking a last <em> Protego, </em> she lunged and slammed into Bellatrix with her shoulder. The woman staggered to the side and for a moment ceased to cast spells against her, but Ginny found herself overcome by Bellatrix’s subordinates, and unable to take advantage of the moment before Bellatrix raised her wand and was again in the fight.</p><p>Then the fight came to an abrupt halt as a barrier was raised between them.</p><p>“<em>Enough! Truce! I call a truce!” </em> Hermione Granger spoke as Nymphadora held a light from her wand again into the air, the order to stand down rippling through the forest. The sounds of combat faded away.</p><p>Bellatrix pulled back with a mocking bow to Ginny. “Again, Mudblood? It’s almost like you want to help me win!”</p><p>“I have my orders,” Hermione answered, approaching Ginny’s side. “Just get out of our way so we can transport our wounded.”</p><p>“I’ve got my own wounded,” Bellatrix answered defiantly, “and I didn’t lay an ambush for your troops, the weasel did that against me!”</p><p>“I don’t use Sectumsempra on people to tear them down to the bone,” Hermione answered. Above, a light dusting of snow had begun to work its way through the magic covering Chernosvyat, and in splotchy patterns started to fall on them again. “If you won’t let us pass, then we’ll carry on together, with a truce after all."</p><p>“I have dead men,” Bellatrix answered.</p><p>“Since when have you cared about the dead? So do I.”</p><p>“You have dead <em>Muggles.</em> Don’t even for a second pretend that’s the same as a dead Wizard. Mudblood, I would bury you, but your Muggles are less than even that.”</p><p>“You would never bother, Lestrange,” Hermione answered. “Just as you call me Mudblood, don’t stand here lying, march or die.”</p><p>“It’s <em> not </em> a lie. I would give you a grave for the sake of the magic in you, that’s worth respecting even when you’ve stole it, perhaps especially because you’ve stole it. You and your kind understanding nothing of the Purity of Blood, magic is a tool for you no different than a gun.” It was a serious, intelligent Bellatrix saying those words, for a heartbeat overcoming the madness that reigned in her mind , and that gave Hermione pause.</p><p>Then Bellatrix turned, and became to march away with her men, the <em> Rabdos </em> held in one hand, her own wand in the other. The Russian force followed, a safe distance to the side, paralleling them. Wands and guns were ready, nobody trusted the other, and everyone knew that the slightest mistake would mean another fight, even if it was entirely an accident. That was simply the risk they accepted in this situation.</p><p>Hermione was acutely aware, again carrying her wounded friend, that she was vulnerable to a strike by Bellatrix. But the Death Eater seemed to have a single-minded intent to carry away the <em> Rabdos. </em> They exfiltrated through the magical passage to Chernosvyat in the tension of peace between two groups of committed enemies.</p><p>The sun hit so hard that Hermione reached for her sunglasses before she carried on with Larissa. She paid no more heed to Bellatrix until a voice called to her.</p><p>“Have fun, Muddy!”</p><p>It made her grit her teeth, but then Bellatrix and her Wizards, the <em> Rabdos, </em> the bodies of the fallen, all apparated together back to their lines. That left Hermione and their team together, in the snow, in the sun, on the slope. Holding Larissa… The winter chill creeping into her bones, as the adrenaline faded. But the rays of sun between the trees were absolutely beautiful, and for a moment, she stopped to think.</p><p>They had, by one perspective, failed their mission. But there were still things to fight for. The moment ended. Hermione carried on. She needed to get Larissa to the doctors. Nothing else mattered. She could still sleep that night if only she kept those alive right now, still breathing at the end of the day. That was a cause worth fighting for. You could never help the dead, but Larissa wasn’t dead. Not yet, and not in this fight.</p><p>They got her down to Zurab’s cabin. The doctors were waiting there by the helicopters, and the old man had boiled water and ripped up old clothes to support the full medical kits.</p><p>“It’s Larissa Sergeivna, Sectumsempra bad enough to damage the internal organs!” Hermione called, and they quickly took her and brought her to the bed in the cabin, and laid her down. The wounds of the men in the unit were otherwise minor.</p><p>Larissa looked up at Hermione, and smiled a deathless smile that confessed pain, but no fear. “I’ll be back soon, Hermione. Promise.”</p><p>Hermione reached down and grabbed her hand, clasping it until they, together, balled into a shared fist. “It’ll take more than Lestrange to kill you,” she offered. “Now I let them work.” She stepped back, tipped a salute to her friend, and then stepped away. Mister Sologashvili pressed tea to her as she did.</p><p>“Thank you,” she offered quietly, and took the cup, wandering outside to stand by the willows. In preparation for medevac and for leaving the position, Captain Golovin and his crews were removing the shrouds from the helicopters, the snow sliding off into disordered piles on the ground. The air was perfectly still and clear, and from many miles away, she could hear the sound of battle raging. It hadn’t stopped for days.</p><p>When she finished the tea, she struck up a belomor and took a long and hard drag on it, the nicotine reminding her of just how long it had been since her last smoke in the rush that came to her all at once. She didn’t want to think, but she always thought, she could never silence her mind. She was too smart not to think, and sometimes it was just a curse. She’d never thought that when she was young, in Hogwarts. But she certainly thought it now.</p><p>Sergei Alexandrovich came out to her side, with a salute. “Councillor,” he addressed her.</p><p>“Go ahead…?” Hermione felt a quick tension in fear for her friend’s condition.</p><p>“She will live. We need to prepare the aeromedical transport now to a field hospital now, however. But we’ve stabilised her.”</p><p>“Thank God.” She sat Zurab’s cup down on the flowerbox by one of the windows of his cabin, and shook her head. “Well, thank you.”</p><p>“I’ll never need to be thanked for saving a life, but you’re welcome. Are you religious?”</p><p>“No,” Hermione confessed. “But it’s hard to think of anything else to say in these times.”</p><p>“You are quite right. I… <em> GOD. </em> ” He spun to the side and shielded his eyes.</p><p>Hermione saw the glint on the window in front of her become much, much brighter. They were mostly protected by ridges and hills, but…</p><p>“God.”</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>General Pronichev was a life-long soldier, a professional veteran of the Soviet Ground Forces and a graduate of the M. V. Frunze Military Academy who had served three years in Afghanistan and been involved in the Russian intervention to save the Tajik capital of Dushanbe from Islamist militants during their civil war. With the attached units operating his command, the 27<sup>th</sup> Division was nearly at the strength of an Army Corps and likely enough this assignment was going to be his last a division commander before promotion to corps command.</p><p>Or it would be his last entirely. Since early that morning, the Janissaries and associated lesser troops they were facing had been vigorously attacking with a ferocity and professionalism rarely seen in the Army of a Death Eater. Pronichev knew that these men were ruthless and amoral. They were soldiers of Western European nations who had decided that, to protect their families or for the chance of personal wealth, fame and advancement in a regime now hostile to their very existence, they would voluntarily work for their overlords. They were scum, and they were hated like the Waffen-SS had been by the grandfathers of his men— especially, and most similar to Voldemort’s Janissaries, the foreign volunteer units . Like the Waffen-SS, though, they were good at their jobs.</p><p>It would have been much nicer for everyone if they were stupid, or ensorcelled. In the early days of the invasion of the CIS, some Death Eaters leading entirely ensorcelled armies had been fantastically useless. One of them had managed to lead his entire Army into the Kiev reservoir because the 1960s vintage reservoir for a hydroelectric dam wasn’t present on the wizarding maps he was using to navigate. Those days were gone; war was a process of natural selection, artificially sped up.</p><p>These Janissaries, with their Challenger II’s and their high morale, their effective tactics and reasonably trained leaders, had been pushing back against his troops down for the whole morning. He didn’t have the strength to stop them as they pushed toward Dusheti and Aragvispiri south of the Zhinvali reservoir.</p><p>Not the conventional strength.</p><p>“They’re approaching the position now, Sir,” one of his staff officers reported. Midway between Bichnigauri and Aragvispiri on the Georgian Military Road, a retreating Armoured Recovery Vehicle had dropped the badly damaged T-64 it was hauling, the better to escape faster from the onrushing Janissary troops. The abandoned, damaged tank served to perfectly conceal the spot where his combat engineers had dug up the ground and placed the charge.</p><p>“Don protective gear,” Pronichev ordered his staff. The order had already been distributed in code to the entire 27<sup>th </sup> Division and its allied supporting units. Now, eight kilometres from the position of the abandoned tank, Pronichev and his command staff did the same, just to be safe. Mask, gloves, the full sealed suit, cloak, full OZK gear.</p><p>“The Turkmens are in position?”</p><p>“Yes, General.” One armoured regiment in each flanking valley a few klicks to the south. It wouldn’t have been enough for a counterattack, but it was about to be enough for a counterattack.</p><p>He looked through his telescope at the field. Pronichev could see the fires sweeping the ridges on both flanks. There were huge areas that conventional incendiaries and spells like fiendfyre had set alight, consuming the slopes and the trees in intense firestorms. The artillery and rocket fire left puffs of smoke, cracks of light, from strike after strike. One could see tanks manoeuvring and firing in the easier ground, the lines of wheeled combat vehicles pushing down roads. Indeed, closer in, closer to that wrecked tank, one could see lines of dismounted Janissaries pushing across the fields, charging from copse to copse, trying to keep under cover as the Russian artillery hit them again and again to cover the retreat.</p><p>Then those Janissaries ran out of time. Their motivations for joining the Corps, for serving Voldemort, they would have to answer to God for, if he was waiting to judge them. If he wasn’t, this was certainly one of the more merciful ways to die in the war. If you were close enough.</p><p>It was a very, very bad way to die if you were too far away. He saw magic from one of the Wizards with the group consume a hillside, the position of some of his own men. Then the ten second warning sounded, and he turned away and took cover like all of the others. Being a general mattered very little against the power he had ordered unleashed.</p><p>He didn’t trigger it himself, of course. A remote link at that distance had too much of a risk of failure. He had to trust that his engineers knew what to do, that they knew the right moment to choose. That it would be at approximately the predicted time, so that his division would be ready and waiting for it and they would not take casualties in their own forces.</p><p>And then the brilliant light split the sky, the flame of a thousand suns rising over the field. The advancing Janissaries, their tanks, their armoured vehicles, vanished in a flash. The light began to fade as it rose into the air by the convective effect, and transformed into an ugly orange flaming mushroom cloud, slowly turning to smoke as the nuclear chain reaction ended, the intense heat, however, remaining, the fat lightning bolts it generated spreading from the centre.</p><p>The roar hit their position, the whiplash of the wind over their vehicles. It would have been overpowering if Pronichev had not already seen the use of tactical nuclear weapons over the course of the war.</p><p>As the overpressure and the shockwave passed by, the Turkmen tank regiments got underway. They had their internal overpressure systems on full power, which sucked in air through filtration units and then kept the bleed pressure high so contaminated air could not leak into the crew compartments of their armoured vehicles.</p><p>Probably there was nothing more surreal in all the world than the wizards who accompanied them, casting magic in full CBRN combat gear. But war itself was madness, and the purple and green and red that flashed inside the cloud as the allied forces counterattacked was impossible to tell from the unnatural lightning that the nuclear effect itself provided.</p><p>Aircraft swung overhead, attacking into the gap in the short-range air defences, into the distracted wizards who could not see through the nuclear cloud. The hoarded air power was put to the effect of supporting the counteroffensive, while a massive concentration of fire from the Ural and Grad launchers delivered rockets down across the entire front.</p><p>They attacked, afraid but undaunted, into the heart of the nuclear fire.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Luna was standing calmly by Dora, watching the mushroom cloud rise into the air to the north. Hermione came up to her side, still smoking. “It’s a hell of a thing,” she whispered.</p><p>Luna smiled. “Well, perhaps the radiation drives away Wrackspurts. I can’t imagine it doesn’t do anything positive at all. Shouldn’t we be going?”</p><p>“Luna…?”</p><p>“Well, there are still four healthy witches here, and we only need one helicopter for the wounded. So we’re going to join the counterattack, right?”</p><p>Sometimes, Hermione hated that creepy way that Luna could predict exactly how she felt. How the humiliation of letting Bellatrix have Koschei’s <em> Rabdos, </em> of letting her escape, all as part of Tonks’ plot, was burning inside, and she really did want to help the Division. They were all her comrades in the 27<sup>th </sup> , muggle and wizard, and they needed every bit of support they could get.</p><p>Yes, Luna Lovegood knew everything about her, and knew exactly how she was going to respond. Somehow. Hermione grimaced and turned back to the helicopters. “Captain Golovin, let’s mount up! Three Galinas can go in with four witches!”</p><p>Probably Anatoly Borisovich did not really want to fly his helicopters toward the rising and slowly dissipating nuclear mushroom cloud. But he was a professional soldier and an officer. He did not hesitate, or question the intent. Instead, he came to attention and saluted. “Of course, Councillor. We are fully armed, so we can do it. I will contact Major Lukachenko immediately and receive the coordinates for us to provide assistance, plan our route of approach, and obtain the appropriate recognition codes. Five minutes.”</p><p>“Five minutes,” Hermione answered, acknowledging the salute, and turning to smoke down her cigarette.</p><p>A minute later, Ginny came up with some food. “Eat. You haven’t since early this morning.” It wasn’t an offer.</p><p>“Thank you,” Hermione acknowledged weakly.</p><p>“We won’t be able to eat again until we pull back from the contaminated zone, you’d be too weak otherwise,” the redhead smiled. “I have Vasya getting the men ready,” she added.</p><p>Hermione gulped down her food quickly. “Thank you.”</p><p>“Oh, I know how it is. Like a Quidditch match there’s no stopping and no substitutions until we’ve won, that’s the way this war is for you, Hermione. I don’t need to be Luna to know that we were going to go in.”</p><p>“I guess I’m pretty predictable,” Hermione acknowledged between more mouthfuls, shamelessly unconcerned about speaking with her mouth full of food. There wasn’t enough time to be dignified in war. “Hopefully not in fighting, though.”</p><p>“I’d say you weren’t. What…” Ginny trailed off, thinking better of the question.</p><p>“You want to know what happened in Chernosvyat? Ask Dora when this is over. But let’s not worry about it right now, because … It’s part of the plan. I’m not sure if the plan is as stupid as Dumbledore’s were in retrospect, but it’s part of the plan, so we were executing the plan. It still feels like we lost, though.”</p><p>“So now we’re going to mount up and fly out to defend Georgia, and make it into a win.”</p><p>“That’s about the size of it,” Hermione answered, but then her voice grew serious. “I’d like to keep the number of nuclear bombs we have to detonate in this lovely country down to one. And I’d <em> very much </em> like to keep Bellatrix Lestrange from feeling like she has won. And we’re here, we’re fit, and our comrades are dying. Let’s go fight.”</p><p>“Let’s go fight,” Ginny repeated, and with a sigh, tipped a salute. “We should go, then.”</p><p>Behind them, the helicopters were spinning up, and the two friends, who had already been to hell and back, jogged to their respective helicopters. Hermione and Dora were together on the lead Galina as the three massive assault helicopters went to full power and rose into the sky. Receiving directions from Major Lukachenko until they were handed over to the Forward Air Controllers over the division, they ran low to the ground at full power. Flying at 300km/h, they would be there in much less than an hour.</p><p>With the doors to the troop compartments slammed closed, Hermione fixed her attention on the dosimeter. The troops could simply pull on their gear, and Hermione and Dora did have cloaks to protect their clothes from excessive concentrations of physical contaminants, but they would have to rely on bubble-head charms for breathing air. And they wanted to wait as long as they could before casting them.</p><p>Flying steadily to the north over the dizzying expanse of green trees poking through snowy white fields and farms, they were heading into newly irradiated ground, in a war that did not seem to want to end. The noise of the rotors hammered into their heads, and the land was visible, in how beautiful it was, through only the glimpses afforded in the windows of the troop compartment. Dora took over monitoring the dosimeter, and Hermione focused through one of the windows, and watched it for as long as she could. As they approached, she could see the flash of fire ahead, the guns and the rockets hammering the enemy, the mushroom cloud now well on the way to dissipating in the air currents high above the field of battle. Magic, too, was visible, and the flash of rockets from ground attack aircraft as they swept over the Janissary units, and the Turkmen tanks pressed the counterattack as hard as they could. War.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Hand signals -- almost every military has hand signals for voiceless communication, but they're of limited use in the gloom of Chernosvyat.<br/>Close quarters battle -- Small unit engagement within the range of 100 meters to hand-to-hand.<br/>Overpressure and shock wave -- a nuclear detonation does most of its damage with a rapid increase in air pressure, which causes physical damage, like a hand slapping things, rather than with radiation. Despite the stereotype of nuclear weapons, it is fully possible to engage in combat close to, and shortly after, the use of tactical nuclear weapons.<br/>Forward air controller -- military officer responsible for coordination of attacks and movement of friendly helicopters and aerocraft over the battlefield.<br/>Turkmen -- Allied CIS forces of the Republic of Turkmenistan.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Stalemate</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Eleven: Stalemate</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix had apparated back to her command post just to find that Kempler had already gone forward to keep the troops moving as hard as he could. The front line had moved f ourteen kilometres in six hours, it was very fine going in the face of incredibly heavy opposition. An army could certainly advance faster than that in many cases, but not one of two almost evenly matched forces fully engaged in main combat on rough terrain . Of course, the actual rationale for the offensive was already, in her view, ended. She had the <em> Rabdos </em> of Koschei, she had found Chernosvyat. It felt almost too easy.</p><p>Still, she appreciated the overall strategic situation. There was plenty to do, and cutting the rail-line from Poti to Alat would materially benefit the overall war effort. There was also an uncomfortable distraction in her mind and heart, the question of Tonks’ and Mudblood’s claims. <em> Were they telling the truth? </em> The eerie message from Koschei beyond the grave had certainly seemed to reinforce the idea that they were.</p><p>She wanted to go to the muggle maps in her headquarters and start pouring over them to understand the position of Mount Ararat and how she might reach it with her forces. But there were more important things to do. Her orders to Kempler had led to a headlong rush by her units, and Bellatrix was becoming aware that she needed to get a handle on the situation, especially since Kempler had gone forward and of course her command staff was operating somewhat on autopilot.</p><p>Jorge had kept the situation together in broad terms, but he had been constrained by his orders from Kempler. By Bellatrix’s orders, too. She silently cursed herself. The situation really had gotten out of hand. “Jorge, I want you to halt the offensive and consolidate on the first easily defended line against a counterattack. They’re drawing us out.” It was basically duelling theory writ-large, after all.</p><p>“With pleasure, M’lady. May you live forever!” He snapped a salute and turned away to the bank of radios, and sent the order. He knew, as she had realised, that the danger of a rapid assault was that the Wizards would be unable to adequately screen the army, as they would be locked into main battle with the defenders. Detecting threats, secrets, mines and traps would become much more difficult, they would be caught entirely up in forcing their way forward. The risk would start to increase, and it would keep increasing.</p><p>Bellatrix’s plan at this point was straightforward. She would stabilise the situation on the front, and then as a sign of her triumph and her service… She would trigger the Dark Mark. That would be her demonstration of her success, for the Dark Lord, these days, tolerated no distractions that were not worth his while. His most powerful and most successful Death Eater having quickly executed her mission, returning in triumph from Chernosvyat, was certainly the occasion that it was meant for.</p><p>A hollow part of Bellatrix suspected that the praise would be perfunctory. The <em> Rabdos </em> of Koschei would be taken away into the chambers of her Master, and they would not even exchange more than a few perfunctory words. She would be sent back to the front. The Dark Lord would add the <em> Rabdos </em> to his studies and his plan for immortality.</p><p>She would, at least get to see her daughter. The old thrill of service to the inestimable Dark Lord faded. Whereas before she would be enormously excited to have a justification to trigger the Dark Mark, now she was expecting that it would only bring disillusionment and ill-content to her heart. The prospect of seeing Delphini was so much more important.</p><p>Bellatrix turned over to the map board where Jorge and his subordinates were plotting out the positions that they would assume for halting and consolidating from the reckless push. Leaning over the maps, she again had to appreciate the professionalism of the man with his neat little mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, as lean as a rail, who did the muggle chores of running her army for her. Impulsively a part of her wanted to admit that he had value, from the year they had now spent fighting in Russia and Georgia together.</p><p>Then the radios screamed with a feedback squeal that she had learned to recognise. Bellatrix snapped around with her wand, summoning and casting “<em>Protego!</em>” without looking, without thinking, indeed, forcing her eyes to the ground. “Jorge, cover!” She added a moment later as the spell knocked aside the tent to form a barrier between them and the attack.</p><p>It was far enough away that she didn’t need to. But the impulse and instinct had been well-founded. She had trained herself to respond to that kind of signal from the muggle world with immediate, and instant action. Unthinking action was required to survive the Atom Bomb. Everything else was inadequate. For a moment, she held her shields expecting more bombs, more detonations. She remembered the night when, in confusion and terror and anger, much of the world had fired nuclear weapons back at Britain after their own salvoes from the submarines they had suborned triggered the worldwide nuclear holocaust. She had stood at Voldemort’s side and helped him cast the great work of the shields which the Wizarding world had spent most of the Cold War working on, the great work which would inert the nuclear weapons as they descended through it, and protect all of the cities of Britain, all of the wizarding places and lands.</p><p>On that night, she had felt the culmination of the superiority of Wizards over muggle-kind. While the rest of the world burned in fire, the pure-bloods under the Dark Lord had protected an entire nation from nuclear attack. Four years later with the enemy having rallied and fought back on so many fronts, with the wizarding world riven by a civil war which was mirrored in the muggle efforts to destroy them, she no longer had such feelings or illusions.</p><p>Instead, she stood there, and kept her defensive shields up around her command post. Jorge rose, and dusted himself off.</p><p>“I told you to stay down,” Bellatrix said without missing a beat.</p><p>“It was an ambush, M’lady, and we need to get the men ready to receive a counterattack. I’m a soldier, too.” He turned toward the radios.</p><p>Bellatrix slowly realised she was not, in fact, in a fight for her life. That the bomb had been the only one. An ambush for her men that she had been just a bit too slow to countermand Kempler’s efforts (which were her own fault; she had, after all, ordered him to reach Objective X at all costs), not a massive attack. There weren’t enough nukes left for that. They knew she and her wizards would be ready for it.</p><p>Stealth and subterfuge had delivered an ugly blow to her forces instead, and the enemy was, as Jorge noted, bound to counterattack. For a moment, she wondered why she had wasted the time to order a muggle to take cover. But then a frustrated look darkened her features. It was all a waste, anyway. She had met the Dark Lord’s objectives. The continued fighting was for the moment unnecessary.</p><p>She looked to the south, to see the hideous beauty of the mushroom cloud rising into the sky. It <em> was </em> beautiful, there was no doubt about that. “Jorge, fall all the way back to Ananuri. We will hold forward positions south of the Jvari Pass, but that’s all. I have met Our Lord’s objective. The rest was secondary. And I don’t want the Army conducting offensive operations while I am returning to London to bring him his prize.”</p><p>“M’lady,” he acknowledged, a trace of relief, perhaps, in his voice.</p><p>“And Jorge?” Bellatrix turned to him, feeling very exhausted all of a sudden. Success had never quite been punctuated before with such a graphic demonstration of futility as that rising cloud.</p><p>“M’lady?”</p><p>“When I leave, <em> you’re </em> in command. Everyone else can get fucked, I need my army.”</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The three Galinas had been directed to swing around the main centre of the battlefield where the nuke had been detonated and approach from the west. Hermione could see the line of wild fires, unmaintained, and overgrown brush, that marked the border between Georgia and South Ossetia. That war was now forgotten in the shadow of a war so much larger, but the memory on the land itself remained.</p><p>In poor visibility and light snow, the flight had been fraught with peril, but Captain Golovin and his men had come through. Flying at speed fifty metres off the ground, they were vectored toward the mountain village of Etvalisi. As they approached, the doors to the troop compartments were flung open.</p><p>With magical bubbles engulfing their upper bodies, the Witches were free from the constraints of the heavy CBRN gear which protected the men. But the door-gunners were in position to one side of the helicopters, Hermione in her helicopter, the lead, took up position on the other side. She could see anti-air fire coming at them, and then a roar of power, she turned away <em> Confringo </em> directed against the Galina she was in by a wizard on the ground, using her own <em> Protego. </em> Soon, both her and Dora were in it deep. The door gunner didn’t even bother, he left his side of the helicopter clear for Dora to work. On the other two birds, with Luna and Ginny, the door guns were firing…</p><p>But with the Witches keeping the helicopters safe from the massive fire directed against them, it was the guns that spoke, the rocket pods, the anti-tank missiles, the Gsh-30-2’s. Protected by the witches onboard, Golovin led his force in low, fast, and straight at the enemy. Flares and chaff were being ejected behind them, magical shields flared around them as they came under attack.</p><p>And their rocket-pods screamed with the deafening roar of the continuous fire of the rockets being salvoed as the noise tore through Hermione’s ears until she quenched it by forming a sound bubble around herself. The streaks of flame and smoke as the rockets tore into their targets silently were now the only indication of the sheer intensity of the combat. In the distance to their left, Hermione could see what she was sure was a Rapier anti-air missile launcher, and she took advantage of Dora’s presence also covering the Galina they were flying in to shift her wand, scream the word into the silence, and smash it <em> Reducto </em> before quickly shifting back to shielding.</p><p>The three helicopters completed their pass, and Hermione was gratified and relieved to see that the Galinas that both of her friends were flying on were also safe. They now swung back around to attack with their remaining missiles and cannon ammunition as they returned toward their own lines. Circling through the smoke and flame of the battlefield, Hermione had little chance to be relieved, for it was their most vulnerable moment and she was quickly called upon to defend the helicopter again, and again.</p><p>Captain Golovin trusted her. He was using his Galinas in a way that would be absolutely fatal without Witches onboard all of them, but with the presence of the witches, guaranteed that they could inflict much more harm than they usually could dream of. They swept the battlefield as flying killers, leaving up to their other nickname of “crocodiles”. Burning tanks and armoured vehicles and dead men were what they left in their wake. With the rockets already exhausted, the combination of firing guided missiles and cannons inflicted the remaining damage on the enemy from behind as they headed back out.</p><p>Passing over the enemy lines, Hermione cast her own <em> Confrigo </em> which tore through a set of machine-gun and mortar positions of the Janissaries. The screams of men burned alive were lost between the magic and the howl of the rotors and the roar of the battle. It was all so distant from fifty metres in the air and two hundred kilometres an hour. Then they swept back over their own lines, and again the helicopters circled.</p><p>They would not land, it was much too dangerous for that. They could not risk being destroyed on the ground, the Galinas were precious now. After the disruption of the nuclear attacks, the CIS armed forces never had enough helicopters, or tanks, or aircraft. Instead, the sergeants of the protection squads rigged zip lines. As they hovered for a brief minute, Hermione bade Captain Golovin farewell, and abseiled out of the hovering Galina. The moment her boots hit the ground, she cast <em> Protego </em> to cover Dora and the men who followed her. The timing was smart, as they were far enough forward to take heavy machine-gun fire instantly.</p><p>Nonetheless, the enemy had been badly hit by the assault, disordered by the nuclear attack which had presaged the counterattack. The arrival of four more Witches on a narrow section of the front was Hell for those Janissaries facing them, and worse after they had just been subjected to a vigorous attack run by three Galinas.</p><p>Worse still was yet to come. With a hand-signal, Hermione led the way, running over to one of the advancing T-64s and leaping up onto the engine compartment, holding the grab-irons firmly as they drove forward, back directly toward the positions which they had just flown over. The men of the protection squads, in their full CBRN gear, followed suit.</p><p>Then a Rook tore overhead, the Su-25 flying low and fast. It swept across the defensive line of the Janissaries from southeast to northwest, perpendicular to their position, rocket-pods salvoing in a ripple, a continuous chain of smoke and flame that tore across the enemy position just before they advanced in close. The tank’s gun fired, at some more distant target, and the noise reverberated through her bones from the shock in the metal, even though it had been silenced in the air.</p><p>They were in position. Hermione with her squad, and the others, leapt down from the tanks and began to attack the enemy. They tore through a devastated line which already could not hold. The snow was blasted away from the ground, revealing the black-charred remnants of the last growth of fall. Dozens of muggle soldiers could fall from their power in heartbeats, even when their intention was to disarm, to drive back, to disrupt, the killing was inevitable. It had changed them all.</p><p>The enemy were falling back, retreating. Their own tanks, their own soldiers in their masks, pushed forward on the attack. Today, they had halted the enemy, and the roar of <em> “Urrah! </em> ” that spread down the loose-files of men pushing the attack forward as hard as they could made her ill-content at the morning’s events vanish in the emotions of a day which already seemed to have lasted a year, and yet was not quite over.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix had worked with Jorge to get a handle on the situation. They had pulled back unit by unit, with covering fire, to assume defensive positions where the reservoir formed an impediment to a continued advance by the CIS forces. Then they had issued the orders to dig in, with Bellatrix making it clear that they should expect to hold these positions until winter was over.</p><p>They still had their foothold south of the Jvari Pass. They could resume the offensive whenever they wanted to, assuming that the enemy was not heavily reinforced, and of course, they could request their own reinforcements in that case, the strategic position would not change. So she could keep the Army here, and return from Britain to resume operations at the time of her choosing.</p><p>That would likely be in spring. Thanks to the nuclear war, the winters were harsh and brutal, though the situation was not a true nuclear winter, the concept had been overrated, and the arsenals smaller than they had been a decade before. Still, she had finally checked the maps, and there were three hundred and twenty-five road kilometres between her Army’s new defensive positions and Mount Ararat.</p><p>Bellatrix felt more than enough disquiet about returning to Britain in the circumstances. But the Dark Lord had ordered her to bring him the <em> Rabdos </em> of Koschei the Deathless, not to bring him immortality. She was obeying his orders in full strictness. Re-interpreting them because of what she felt would mean severe punishment, even as her disquiet reminded her, somewhere inside, that she was then potentially subject to a catch-22, unable to succeed no matter what she did.</p><p>Was this really the future she had spent fourteen years in Azkaban for? Apparently the answer was yes.</p><p>She was walking toward a Land Rover now, with a couple of light armoured vehicles to escort it. They’d have to drive all the way to Vladikavkaz, then take the train to the captured Khankala military airfield east of Grozny. Then the flying would begin, and she would get to London… Eventually. It was much too far to apparate, and she had in the end decided to present the <em> Rabdos </em> to the Dark Lord the old fashioned way. Her one concession to speed had been to request one of the Concordes which now served as special transports for Death Eaters on official business.</p><p>There was just one final bit of business. She paused beside the Land Rover, and turned to the individual who had come up with Jorge to salute, with a trembling hand. Men who failed, after all, did not expect a great reception from Death Eaters. That included Martin Kempler, at the moment.</p><p>“Mister Kempler,” she said coldly. “Your recklessness imperilled the Army.”</p><p>“I obeyed your orders, and if we had not been preparing to halt the attack, I could have thrown in the reserves and salvaged the offensive,” Kempler answered, drawing himself up rigidly, courage flecked in blue-grey eyes. “I will accept the punishment given, but I am not afraid to defend my actions in the circumstances.”</p><p>Bellatrix, black hair, grey eyes, learned in close to him. “Do you know what I have done to people with the Cruciatus curse before?”</p><p>“I’ve heard the stories, M’lady. You are a Death Eater, your reputation does not need to be elaborated upon,” he answered, hands clasped behind his back, posture rigid.</p><p>“ Well here is what I am telling you now,” she leaned in closely, and grinned to show her rows of blackened teeth. “You will not imperil my Army. You may, nominally, under the Articles of War, be the commander when I leave, but you will let Jorge implement everything necessary for the safety of the Army in my absence and you will not contradict or countermand any order he gives. Is that clear?”</p><p>“ And what is the objective, M’lady?”</p><p>“To preserve the fucking Army,” Bellatrix answered with her tone dropping and growing chill. “Stop questioning me, boy. I spent longer in Azkaban than you’ve been an adult. This is a war on terms made up by muggles, so <em> you. Will. Let. My. Best. Muggle. Do. His. Job.</em>”</p><p>“Ma’am!” He came to attention and saluted.</p><p>Bellatrix smiled, sickeningly sweet. “Now that’s more like it.” And with no further ado, she got into the back seat of the Land Rover, the case holding the <em> Rabdos </em> of Koschei close at hand. She would not let it out of her sight until it was delivered to the Dark Lord.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Major Lukachenko had brought the battalion up as part of the reserves after Hermione and her team had departed from the location to travel to Chernosvyat. They had caught up several days later in the aftermath of the fighting near the Zhinvali reservoir. The battalion was camped on the outskirts of the village of Varsimaani, near a bend in the road heading south from Dusheti, to the west of where the nuclear detonation had occurred, and thus protected by the prevailing wind from radioactive fallout. A low ridge rose to the northwest, and the wind sweeping off of it was bitterly cold.</p><p>Hermione sat in Alexandra’s tent with her, on camp chairs. On a small, low table salvaged from the wreckage of a house in the village, they had a can of marinated herrings and another of cheese popped open, and an open bottle of Chacha, the so-called “Georgian Vodka”, with a glass for each of them. The cigarette smoke from the belomors they’d smoked some indeterminate time before still hung in a haze around the single gas lantern. The camp stove was trying its level best to keep them warm, but their coats were spread like blankets in their laps and the Chacha had to take care of the rest of the need for warmth they felt.</p><p>Alexandra was laughing, teasing Hermione, in a good-natured way. They had their legs crossed, kicked back as much as the chairs could allow. Soldiering meant you had to enjoy small pleasures, to take them for what they were worth, when you found them. “Should I get a dosimeter, and see how much is in the fish,” she gestured to the can.</p><p>“Oh come on, I think I care less than <em> you </em> do,” Hermione leaned back.</p><p>“True. I think we’re getting less here than we did going through Tbilisi, anyhow,” there was a glint in Alexandra’s dark eyes, a wisp of blonde hair escaping from a tightly controlled braid.</p><p>Hermione didn’t really care about her appearance, not anymore, but it seemed a rule, for cultural reasons, that Russian women in the military did try their best, Ginny certainly imitated them, and Hermione found it a point of pride that her newly admitted lesbianism hadn’t let to any lingering glances with her friends. She wanted friends, they were more sure than lovers anyway. “Did we really win enough to celebrate with drinks, Alexandra Rostislavna? Is this victory?”</p><p>“I don’t know what happened inside of Chernosvyat since you can’t tell me,” Alexandra shrugged. “But it seems like victory to me. We gave them one hell of a bloody nose, we threw them back from the railway and the main highway. The routes for shipping freight from Alat to Poti remain open, the Pipeline is open… The Black Sea Fleet will still have fuel for operations, which means Sevastobol may hold out for a while longer yet. We held the line.” She raised her cup of Chacha.</p><p>Hermione obligingly raised her own, even though she didn’t quite agree with the sentiment. “Hold the line!” she echoed firmly, but with the subtle difference of thinking ahead to the occasions that they would have to reprise the performance, again and again. She downed her cup just like her friend and felt the comforting pain of the burn down to her stomach.</p><p>“How the hell did you ever end up a child soldier, anyhow?” Alexandra asked, eyeing the Chacha bottle speculatively as the alcohol took effect.</p><p>“A child soldier?” Hermione stared at her.</p><p>“What else do you call what you’ve told me? Recruited into an Army by the Headmaster of your school, fighting the Dark Lord who has conquered half the world, nuked us, doing it as a <em> kid. </em> ”</p><p>“Dumbledore told us that it was important, we were Harry’s friends and Harry…” She choked on her tears, suddenly. “He was supposed to be able to defeat the Dark Lord, him alone.” It was not quite true, Neville Longbottom shared a birthday with Harry, but nobody could imagine Neville defeating the Dark Lord… Until the moment that Neville had given up his life to save Nymphadora Tonks, and in the process proved his core of Gryffindor Steel, and also removed forever the possibility of his defeating the Dark Lord. An hour later, Harry had been gone too, and what sometimes still gnawed inside of Hermione was the possibility that now the Dark Lord couldn’t be defeated.</p><p>“Before the war,” Alexandra answered, her voice sounding distant, “when everything in Russia was very bad, because of the situation after the collapse of the Union, there was this television show, which existed to, in an exaggerated style, show disasters, violence, mob killing, riots, in other countries. They let you laugh at it, to make you feel better and think your life wasn’t so bad after all. Children getting duped into fighting a war by their teacher? That sounds like something from the middle of Africa on that show.”</p><p>Hermione bit back an intensely angry reply. Instead, she reached for the bottle of Chacha, picked it up, poured herself another little cup worth, and bolted it back. For a moment, the pain in her throat brought clarity even as the alcohol dissipated it. Her eyes narrowed, and she looked at Alexandra, who for her own part was silent, clearing acknowledging that she had pushed the limit with her friend.</p><p>“You’re right,” Hermione finally answered, and her words brought surprise to Alexandra. “I’m as pissed as hell at you right now, my friend, but it will pass. Because you’re right. But—Alexandra Rostislavna? There was nobody else.”</p><p>“So, when it’s necessary to win the war, send in the kids?”</p><p>“Exactly.” Hermione slammed her glass down and refilled it. “Wouldn’t you? If that’s what it took to save Russia from Voldemort?”</p><p>Alexandra let her, but then quietly removed the bottle, filling her own cup again and then capping it and dropping it into one of her boots. “Yes, I would. I’d do anything. I’d even welcome traitors back, if I could get them to bleed the enemy for me. After all I’ve seen and done, I’d sell my soul to win.”</p><p>“Well,” Hermione smiled with an expression on her face more suited for crying, “Maybe I already have.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Gsh-30-2 -- 30mm automatic cannon mounted on the sides of the Mi-24 "Galina" assault helicopter. <br/>"Rook" -- translation of the nickname of the Su-24 ground attack jet. <br/>Short note on Russian naming customs: Roughly speaking, most formal would be, for example, in Larissa's case, "Councillor Naryshkina". Respectful, say a professional setting, would be "Larissa Sergeivna" (first name and patronymic). Hermione is close enough to call her Larissa--especially because Larissa Sergeivna understands she's a westerner. However, Hermione is close enough that sooner or later she will probably pick up that Larissa is fine with being called "Lara" by her, in informal settings--the "standard dimunitive" that her family and close friends would use. So keeping track of the names that would authentically be used for a single person in Russia in a story can actually be a bit of a chore to someone who is not very familiar with the process!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. The Dominion of the Sword</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Twelve: The Dominion of the Sword</p><p> </p><p> </p><p></p><blockquote>
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    <strong> <em>Lay by your pleading, </em> </strong>
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    <strong><em>Law lies a bleeding; </em> </strong>
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  <p><strong><em>Burn all your studies down, </em> </strong> <strong><em>and </em></strong></p>
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    <strong><em>Throw away your reading. </em> </strong>
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    <strong><em>Small power the word has, </em> </strong>
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    <strong><em>And can afford us </em> </strong>
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    <strong><em>Not half so much privilege as </em> </strong>
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    <strong> <em>The sword does.</em> </strong>
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</blockquote><p>– From <em>The </em><em>Power (or Dominion)</em><em> of the Sword</em>, a Cavalier Ballad of the English Civil War.</p><p>Concorde was the finest invention of Muggle science, and within the proviso of “Muggle science”, Bellatrix would certainly give them that. Even with a refuelling stop in Prague, she was back in London from Grozny in about the same length of time that it took the Hogwarts Express to travel from London to the school. The interior had been converted into a luxurious if narrow suite in the back, and she had gotten some sleep, though the Screams had mostly kept her awake, even though the rather loud cabin guaranteed that the service crew didn’t notice anything was wrong.</p><p>Heathrow was quite different under the Dark Lord’s rule than it had been before the war. The nuclear bombs had not impacted Great Britain—except for the one detonated by the GRU later, in Edinburgh—but the rest of the world certainly <em>had </em>been impacted. Then there was the war, and the efforts to guarantee that the Army always had the resources it needed to keep fighting against those nations whose Wizards still led resistance against the Dark Lord’s rule. As a result, there were precious few civilian flights between points under the Dark Lord’s Dominion, and so an entire Terminal was reserved for Wizards who, due to the exigency of circumstance, had to travel using the Muggle contrivance of the aeroplane.</p><p>With Heathrow so empty, it was easy enough to bring over Air Stairs to the Concorde, with a Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph waiting for Bellatrix at the bottom, looking like a normal model, but actually heavily armoured, complete with kevlar applique below the passenger cabin as a protection against explosives buried under tarmac. Snow carpeted the ground, and most of the planes on the hard at Heathrow were being de-iced. There were two Ministry goons in greatcoats waiting for her, protective service officers. Aurors who now served the Dark Lord, and were much lower on the totem pole as things went.</p><p>With the long case holding the <em>Rabdos </em>in one hand and a valise in the other, Bellatrix ambled down the Air Stairs and tossed herself into the plush back of the brilliantly warm Silver Seraph. In front of her on the walls of the Heathrow terminals, massive black-red-white banners fluttered with an image in black of the Dark Mark upon them. Fashioned by muggles, it looked more than a little bit like a Totenkopf in that guise. The Ministry men took the driver’s and passenger’s front seats as she settled in, and then they were ready to go.</p><p>“Westminster, as fast as you can.”</p><p>“That’s already our order, Madame Lestrange,” the drive answered, making Bellatrix frown. But the car swung out, and as it did, a gaggle of police motorcycles fell in with it, in-front and behind, despite the weather. Their blaring and glaring blues and twos cleared the way as they headed out of Heathrow toward the M4 and then in toward London. She could have apparated, but the automobile trip gave her the chance to clear her mind.</p><p>They ended up having to make something of a dog-leg, based on the roads that were cleared for them. Traffic, light by the standards of London before the war, could have still slowed them down otherwise, and as they neared Westminster, she could see that the Thames was frozen, and there even looked to be an Ice Fair. Bellatrix stared at it for a little while, seeing the small and somewhat subdued fair and wondering if it was meant for the Muggles, a distraction to make them happy and keep them productive in the heart of her Lord’s Empire, or for Wizards to enjoy as it was in old times, now without any muggle-borns to pollute the affair. By either standard, it seemed to be lacking, and Bellatrix imagined it the initiative of some Ministry man who was entirely too cute with his ideas and now had nobody around to tell him no.</p><p>The ice on the Thames and the snow piled around the bases of buildings had become something she was so used to it didn’t seem abnormal anymore for a November. Indeed, the snow to the north at Hogwarts would begin in October, it would stick thoroughly from November 1<sup> st </sup>, and it would not completely melt until the first of May, with an occasional snow-storm after that, almost as late as the end of May. Farmers barely got their ploughing in for May, and got the harvest up before the frost in October. There was barely enough food in Europe, but, of course, a Death Eater had everything she wanted.</p><p>Next they turned in toward what had been the houses of Parliament. Voldemort had been making a very specific point by putting his audience hall here, in the oldest house of Democracy in the world. It meant that the age of muggle democracy was over forever. Instead, the halls which had once held the House of Commons would now serve as a place of supplication before the Dark Lord.</p><p>As a Death Eater, Bellatrix was allowed in without the customary security checks that even wizards and witches were subjected to. Voldemort held court on the Sovereign’s Throne in the Lords Chamber of Westminster. Democracy was indeed very much dead. She approached from the famous Lobby, the old Octagon Hall, with the Commons behind her being dusty and abandoned these past four years.</p><p>Bellatrix entered the Lords Chamber from the opposite end to the Sovereign’s Throne. Swathed in robes of purple and black, there he sat, Voldemort, her Master, the Dark Lord. At each side were the immense ‘Garou’ guards he now used. They were not humans, they were not werewolves, they were not magical creatures or enchanted suits of armour. They had <em>once been </em>humans, twisted and intentionally trapped between wolf and human forms by transfiguration spells, and encased in magical suits of armour, with enchanted weapons. Wearing black capes over their armour, they stood like silent, rigid Anubis figures on the flanks of the Dark Lord. Who knew if they had thoughts of their own anymore beyond service to Him.</p><p>Fenrir Greyback stood in front and to the left of the Dark Lord, leaning against a massive beheading axe which some years ago he had retrieved from the Tower of London. Augustus Rookwood and Corban Yaxley were at his right, speaking softly to each other until she arrived.</p><p>She bowed at the entrance to the hall. The rest she saw only through the corner of the eye, her gaze was fixed strictly on the Dark Lord. Then she stood in place, holding the case which held the <em>Rabdos </em>of Koschei.</p><p>“Approach,” one of the Garou commanded, in a booming, snarling voice. As the Dark Lord said, their transformation made them so much more than the muggles they had once been, and they should be thankful for it.</p><p>Bellatrix walked down the length of the Lords’ Chamber, and then knelt before the Throne. “My Lord,” she addressed Voldemort. “I return, having executed your commands.”</p><p>“Successfully, Bellatrix?” The stark, half-finished white form of the Dark Lord looked down from above.</p><p>“Successfully, My Lord,” Bellatrix answered as she opened the case to reveal the great <em>Rabdos </em>of Koschei. “I took it from his skeleton, on his Divan, within the halls of Chernosvyat. There can be no doubt. He even left a message, placing the story of his existence down to the vagaries of fate.”</p><p>He laughed softly. “My reliable Bellatrix,” Voldemort remarked. “Were it only that I had more of you.”</p><p>The compliment still made Bellatrix flush with pride.</p><p>“Rise, and deliver the <em>Rabdos </em>of Koschei the Deathless to your Lord.”</p><p>Bellatrix drew the <em>Rabdos </em>from the case, and rose to her feet, reversing it and extending it up to the throne. Voldemort reached down and took it with a single hand.</p><p>Bellatrix waited for him to take it, and when he had it securely in hand, she knelt again. “I would have your ear, if I may, My Lord.”</p><p>“Alone?”</p><p>“Alone.”</p><p>“Clear the chamber,” Voldemort ordered smoothly. His voice brooked no dissent. Fenrir and the other Death Eaters were compelled to leave, the doors closing behind them with muffled booms in the cavernous and now almost empty halls. Only Voldemort, Bellatrix, and the Garou remained. “What did you wish to speak to me about, Bellatrix?” The Garou, of course, would not be repeating the conversation that they had. They had been made to keep the Dark Lord’s secrets.</p><p>“I wanted to talk to you about our daughter, My Lord,” Bellatrix replied softly. “I have come to desire a change in the present arrangements.”</p><p>“<em>Your </em>daughter,” he answered with a narrowing of his eyes. “Delphini was a gift to you, Bellatrix, to acknowledge your impeccable loyalty. She was what you desired from me, and she was a reward for your loyalty. I have no interest in a family. I prefer to focus my time and effort on my studies.” Even this conversation was, by Voldemort’s standards, quite considerate in that he even bothered to spend that much time explaining the facts of the situation to Bellatrix.</p><p>But Bellatrix was not interested in just leaving the subject be. “My Lord, she is your daughter by blood, and you have the right to …”</p><p>“I have the right to determine the upbringing of anyone I please,” Voldemort had a sneering sort of ominousness in his voice. “She is well-cared for a good woman from one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, Bellatrix. What cause for complaint do you have?”</p><p>“...I would like to have the opportunity to raise my daughter myself, then, My Lord,” Bellatrix answered, undeterred.</p><p>“You see her often, do you not?” He made an arch expression toward her.</p><p>“A few times a year, My Lord.”</p><p>“You should be thankful. Do you not remember that your Lord is an orphan?”</p><p>“I do, My Lord,” she grimaced and bowed her head.</p><p>“Then Delphini should be thankful she has a living mother. If you would seriously think to put her in the court…” He laughed softly. “I am not some muggle Royal, to have an <em>heir,</em>” his laugh turned sinister. “My reign is perpetual.”</p><p>“May you live forever,” Bellatrix answered with an almost reckless indifference and irony. Voldemort’s contempt for their child brought her close to dangerously seditious thoughts.</p><p>“Careful, Bellatrix. I have no surname. I am Voldemort. Delphini cannot be my heir, because I simply Am—So I will give you something, Bellatrix; your preference, my dear—Lestrange, or Black? She will be a pure-blood, legitimate heir of either house by your choosing, and hold the name you choose as well. Consider that your gift for your success in the execution of your orders. But do not think she is my child or that you can extract favours because you gave birth to her. She was a gift to you. Nothing more.”</p><p>“Black, My Lord,” Bellatrix answered firmly. “Her name should be Black.” She threw caution to the wind with the remaining Lestranges. And the Dark Lord was the Dark Lord, she would put her name on the family Tapestry, she was the only surviving Loyal Black now, it was her right. Delphini Black would be her name, and she would raise her daughter in the way that her father and mother had not raised her, and she would be the greatest witch of her age, and the finest Slytherin of her generation. When everything else had failed and faded into the morass of the War, the prospect brightened her heart and focused on mind on the here and now, far from the Screams, as nothing else did.</p><p>“Delphini Black it is,” Voldemort mused. “One more for the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Very well, Bellatrix. I permit it. However, I will not let you take control of her upbringing. Euphemia Rowle is doing perfectly well at raising her. I need you on the front. I have very few commanders who are able to properly handle delicate tasks like this for me, and execute them in a timely and successful fashion.”</p><p>Bellatrix grimaced and bowed deeper. “My Lord, she is my reward for all of my suffering in Azkaban. I wish very much to be with her, and raise her to keep the faith for you as I kept the faith for you.”</p><p>“Do not try my patience,” Voldemort noted flatly. “Now let us speak of Chernosvyat.”</p><p>Bellatrix wanted to protest, but she felt her Dark Mark burn, and the tone in the Dark Lord’s voice as he changed the subject was that of an ominous warning indeed. “Of course, My Lord,” she finally swallowed down her bitterness and answered.</p><p>“Did they try to stop you, Bellatrix?”</p><p>“They did. It was a force led by Hermione Granger, and Tonks.”</p><p>“The Mudblood and the spawn of your own traitor-sister? How interesting. Did you kill any of them?”</p><p>“I did not, My Lord. I forced them to abandon the <em>Rabdos </em>to me, and retreated to gain control over the situation with my Army. We were taken under heavy attack, including nuclear weapons.” That was … A truth, but also an obfuscation.</p><p>“You should have focused on killing the English Witches and their traitor friends from Koldovstoretz. Even a Corps of Janissaries is not important in the scheme of things. The <em>Rabdos, </em>how powerful is it?” His eyes narrowed, sharply.</p><p>“My Lord, I…”</p><p>“I know you are concealing something from me, and I know what it is. You used the <em>Rabdos </em>of Koschei.”</p><p>Bellatrix prostrated herself until her forehead was against the cool stone of the floor of the Lords’ Chamber. “I did, My Lord.”</p><p>“Was it powerful?”</p><p>“Hard to use at first because of the different grip, but supple power, and easily responding to spells. As fine as anything that might have once been used to summon forth Ancient Magic,” Bellatrix allowed, and that was all very honest.</p><p>“Well, excellent.” Voldemort smiled slightly. “Now, then,” he stood before the throne. “Let us make sure that you did not unfortunately bind yourself to it like Snape did to the Elder Wand.”</p><p>For a moment, Bellatrix’s life, the screams, the abuse, the loveless marriage, the murders, the tortures, the fourteen years in Azkaban, the baby born in her sister’s house, the nukes, the wars, she could see all of it. But especially, most of all, she could see Delphini. She could see her daughter, who would be an orphan exactly like the Dark Lord. She would not get to go home and give her presents for Yule as she had intended, and the killing curse was about to descend on her, and her loyalty had been repaid with death…</p><p>It was instead the Cruciatus Curse which tore into it, electrifying every single nerve, making her body spasmodically and violently jerk in an unfathomable white-hot pain which seemed beyond nature, beyond supernatural, a concentrated hell, an experience of magic worse than fourteen years of Dementors, though it lasted only seconds. It was too much to even force her jaw open to scream, and instead it clenched down until the cracking of one of her rotted teeth was just a minor detail in the horrifying agony that consumed her.</p><p>“Ah, excellent, the <em>Rabdos</em> is as supple as you promised. While it would have been necessary if your stupid, stupid action had led to an unfortunate bond with the <em>Rabdos, </em>I should have pitied the loss of my most loyal and competent Death Eater. Do be thankful for the compliment, Bellatrix. I will permit you two weeks at home before you return to the front, since it’s unlikely the enemy will do anything important for a while after this. Enjoy the time with little Delphini Black.” He rose, leaving her twitching on the cold stone floor, and retreated with his Garou from the Lords’ Chamber, the audience at an end.</p><p>A few minutes later, Bellatrix, no stranger to pain, concentrated on the remaining ache in her broken tooth which would have levelled anyone else. In comparison to the Cruciatus Curse, it was almost a welcome distraction. Using the pain as a focus, she hauled herself to her feet, and limped quietly out of the Chamber the way that she had come. She collected her coat and her valise in the cloakroom, and wandered out into Parliament Square, unescorted, uncaring. It was not actually a dangerous endeavour, even for a Death Eater.</p><p>In this Britain there were police everywhere, under the strict control of Wizards, the Ministry used both wards and cameras in every place possible. Their only job was to keep people like Bellatrix safe, and muggle sorts of people oppressed. The other uses of the Law were very much forgotten. As she stepped out, snow piled in the forgotten Square; protests were no longer allowed here, and with the Dark Lord in residence, nobody came for tourism. Instead, propaganda posters exhorting the muggles to obey for their own good and the shared future of the world hung from every building to drive the point home to anyone unfortunate enough to wander into the vicinity of Westminster.</p><p>Those armed with Wands, and their kept dogs—those armed with guns—kept order by summary ‘justice’, the rule of lynch law, and the threat of their recourse to the Sword was evident in the stark blacks, reds and whites of the posters, matching the banners with the <em>Morsmordre</em>. Of course, the dogs were stronger now; under the posters proclaiming ORDER and OBEY, they walked in black coats, in business suits, heads down, but the rich remain rich. The powerful remained powerful. They had become increasingly needed to maintain the Dark Lord’s war effort, and many of them were richer now, in untouched London, than they had been before the war. Serving the Dark Lord had become good for business, if you were already rich, and wished to become richer by war profiteering.</p><p>She was a Witch, she was in particular a Death Eater, and those posters, those cameras were not meant for her. The business-muggles going about their work around Westminster carefully avoided her. The most they could hope for from a Witch was a wedding, so their half-blood children would be truly part of the elite. Most people took one look at her and knew better than to think of <em>that.</em> There were other, safer witches to tempt into an uneven but still acceptable match with jewelry from Hancocks, the Hyde Park property in Knightsbridge, the vacation home in the Riviera, the stock portfolios worth hundreds of millions of galleons. Not Bellatrix, never Bellatrix. And she liked it just fine that way. <em>Toujours Pur.</em></p><p>Unlike the men hastening about their business at Westminster, she could go anywhere she pleased, and do very nearly whatever she wanted—as long as she was back with her Army in two weeks as the Dark Lord had commanded. Unless it caused problems for the Dark Lord or the Ministry, it was quite likely that she would not be punished for anything inflicted on Muggles. But Bellatrix, sunk low into feelings of bitter betrayal and despair, only wanted her daughter. The Rowle Manor was in the north country, and it was much too far to apparate in one go, so she focused her mind, and prepared to apparate to Diagon Alley. There was nothing in London for her anymore, least of all the Dark Lord. Britain had become a land of slaves, but though she was supposed to be one of the highest of the highest, she felt that in bitter truth, she was no better off than the muggles who scurried nervously away from her path. They were all slaves to his power now, even his own daughter. With a quiet, bitter sigh, she apparated, and went to look for the Floo connection to the Rowle Manor. The sky was as grey as it had been on Azkaban, and the sooner she was away from it, the better.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p><a id="firstHeading" name="firstHeading"></a>Quiet had settled over the wintry stalemate on the Georgian front. Hermione had taken the opportunity for the respite to put in requests for new books. Military reading was easy to come by with a system of Army libraries to supply officers with books that might be worthwhile to keep them at the peak of mental acuity, and even if they weren’t always what she wanted to read, since they were available, she took advantage of the service to read as much as she could. It at least made her feel like she was doing professional development, which at her worst still made her feel better than nothing. In particular, at the moment, she was snug up in her tent with a cup of tea and a history of the Jassy–Kishinev Strategic Offensive Operation (Ясско-Кишинёвская операция).</p><p>She had gotten to the part where King Michael of Romania launched his Self-Coup against Ion Antonescu and Romania had switched sides to join the allies. The author went at some length into the story of the Self-Coups and Michael’s actions, and for a while Hermione was entranced by the sad story of the King who did the right thing only to lose his throne three years later, with a final odd gift that the Soviets had recognised his courage in the circumstances to the point that he had been awarded the Order of Victory. The words of the citation glared up at her:</p><p>«За мужественный акт решительного поворота политики Румынии в сторону разрыва с гитлеровской Германией и союза с Объединёнными Нациями в момент, когда ещё не определилось ясно поражение Германии»</p><p>Hermione didn’t quite think in Russian yet, and she still mentally translated what she read, even though she could comprehend it very well: ‘For the courageous act of decisively turning Romanian strategic-diplomatic policy against Hitlerite Germany and toward alliance with the United Nations at a time when German defeat was not yet inevitable.’</p><p>She finished her cup of tea and looked at the page, remembering Alexandra’s words about how she would do absolutely anything to win.</p><p>There was a clapping of hands in front of her tent. “Come in!” Hermione called out.</p><p>Nymphadora pulled the flap back and stepped inside. “Hermione.”</p><p>“Dora.” Hermione smiled, put a torn off piece of paper in the book, and set it aside. “I’m surprised you’re still here on the Georgian front. I thought you’d have flown back to Nizhniy by now, or maybe found a working part of the Floo network.”</p><p>“Actually, the Dadiani Manor has a Floo link to Orenburg, and from there you can get another to Nizhniy, so I can come home in about twenty minutes… And there’s another connection in Orenburg to Astana, so I can make reports to Union headquarters. And Nizhniy to Moskva. Speaking about that, I wanted to talk about the Dadiani Manor with you.”</p><p>“...Oh? Well, other than being grateful for you telling me about this… Why trust me with that information?”</p><p>“You may have the opportunity to use them soon. I want you involved in operations here. And I’d like you to move to the Dadiani Manor for winter. Master Flyorov and Lady Tamar agreed. Ginny, too.”</p><p>“I should stay with the Battalion,” Hermione answered automatically. “I’d feel <em>awful </em>to spend all winter lounging around a warm Pureblood Manor while Vasya and the others like him are freezing out here on the hillside.”</p><p>“The whole battalion may fall back to winter quarters soon since it doesn’t look like there’s any activity at all from Bellatrix’s Army,” Dora answered. “I need you at one hundred percent while we wait and see what’s going to happen now that we’ve baited the trap.”</p><p>“Can you really call it baiting the trap? More like we failed.”</p><p>Dora sighed. “We succeeded well enough for our real objectives. Don’t torture yourself for nothing, aren’t the belomors enough of that?”</p><p>“Maybe,” Hermione’s face twisted into a thin grin, “I actually like how they taste.”</p><p>“Hermione…”</p><p>“Give me a day to think about it,” the younger witch turned away.</p><p>“Alright.”</p><p>Hermione sat there feeling embarrassed for a while after Tonks left, and then wandered away to find Alexandra. Despite the tension that she had felt when they had their last conversation, she trusted the woman as she trusted very few others these days.</p><p>“Alexandra? Alexandra?” She asked informally as she approached the woman in the headquarters tent. “May I have a moment of your time?”</p><p>“Always, Councillor,” Alexandra answered formally before stepping away from her. It was actually getting a bit warmer outside that day, but it was still cold and snowy. It did, however, guarantee them enough private. “What’s the matter?”</p><p>“Nymphadora wants me and Ginny to stay at the Dadiani Estate,” Hermione answered. “And, honestly, it’s as simple as feeling bad about leaving the battalion behind for now.”</p><p>“Simple problems have simple answers,” Alexandra snarked, and shook her head. “Go. Nymphadora is a MinKol operative working closely with the FSB. I’d stay on her good side, particularly when she’s already a friend. And the plan may help all of us. Indeed, if it does stay quiet here, we can probably fall back… Maybe even the Dadiani will let us camp on their land? Anything better than the unprotected face next to this ridge. But if the enemy resumes the assault, it’s close enough to apparate, right?”</p><p>“Yes, it is.”</p><p>“Then it’s settled. You don’t think I’m going to let extra people gratuitously suffer, do you? Particularly when they’re my friends? Go. And you can survey for a winter camp if we’re allowed to fall back a bit from the front lines. That will keep you feeling useful, right?”</p><p>“You win again, Alexandra.” Hermione shook her head ruefully. “Take care.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Concorde -- was of course the /west/'s only supersonic airliner.<br/>Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph -- a luxury automobile common for royalty and upper aristocracy in Britain in the 1990s.<br/>Totenkopf -- Death's Head. The term actually refers to any Death's Head in a heraldic context--for example, a pirate's skull and crossbones--but specifically refers to certain European units which used it as a sign of their willingness to die in combat--the Prussian Death's Head Hussars, a cavalry unit of the 19th century, was one. Another was the Kornilovtsy, General Lavr Kornilov's White Guards unit (anti-communist) during the Russian Civil War. Of course, the most infamous use was by the Nazi SS.<br/>M4 -- major highway into London.<br/>Ice Fair -- traditionally held on the Thames until the 19th century, it's too warm to hold an ice fair on the Thames today, but after the nuclear war, with depressed temperatures (though the nuclear winter effect was overstated in popular literature, it is not completely absent), it would be easily possible again, and in this case, even as soon as November.<br/>The throne -- the throne in the United Kingdom is inside the Lords' chamber in Parliament, which is on one axis with the Octagon central Lobby, so that both the Commons and the Lords can be seen from a central position.<br/>Morsmordre -- another term for the Dark Mark, but also for the spell which can bring it forth in particular, but here use in a heraldic context.<br/>Jassy–Kishinev Strategic Offensive Operation -- While fairly well explained in the text, someone who wants to understand it more should refer to this map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/RedArmy19Aug31Dec44.jpg where the Jassy-Kishinev Offenisve was the offensive undertaken by Timoshenko's forces beginning on 19 August with Romania switching sides on 23 August.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Reunions</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirteen: Reunions</p><p> </p><p>Ginny and Hermione had packed up their things, and with backpacks fixed and bags in hand, they had waved farewell to Alexandra, Vasya, and the others. The Dadiani Manor was quite secure. Then they had concentrated on it, and a moment of disorientation later, they appeared before it, now more snow-covered than before, but otherwise the same, evergreen trees covered in snow, the flying car parked under cover, a lean-to by the stables, the great stone circuit of the lowest level, the two stories with balconies above it, the finally carved scroll-work on the roof-lines.</p><p>Ginny looked exhausted, in the way that someone whose mind had been pummelled by the Cruciatus Curse only recently could. She relaxed, her shoulders slumped a bit. “I am going to love being back in that <em>banya,</em>” she confessed softly.</p><p>“It will be nice,” Hermione admitted, for all that she was still warring with the guilt. The two walked briskly up to the heavy iron-bossed wooden doors, which swung open for them by the efforts of the liveried footmen. The effect, lending charm and nobility to the scene, set them both at ease as they were taken up the ramp into the upper levels of the house, where their bags were taken to their rooms and they had the opportunity to remove their hats and coats. Even then Hermione still felt embarrassed about tramping boots around, but they were soldiers, and it was wartime, and Master Flyorov had not seemed to mind last time.</p><p>As they entered the parlour, where the Samovar was set out, Ginny gasped in delight and relief.</p><p>Hermione drew herself up, and couldn’t stop the grin from blossoming across her face as she snapped a salute.</p><p>“<em>Larissa,</em>” Ginny got to it first, and ran up to the plush, high-backed chair in which Larissa was engulfed. Her eyes were sunken, her skin sallow and she looked like she had lost more weight than Hermione had thought possible in the space of less than a week, but she was there, and from the brightness in her blue eyes, well enough. Ginny stopped short before hugging her, though.</p><p>“Well, I wouldn’t have minded,” Larissa smiled, “except that it would have spilled my tea. Sit, you two?”</p><p>“I didn’t know you were up and about yet, to be honest, I wasn’t even sure if you were all-right,” Hermione remarked, moving to take a seat on the opposite side of Larissa from Ginny.</p><p>The footmen stayed to serve them tea from the Samovar. “Master Flyorov will be down shortly, ladies,” one of them remarked before they departed.</p><p>“The field hospital was really a miserable experience in the cold,” Larissa admitted. “And the Peritonitis might have made it very hard for even magic to save me. But old Zurab gave me this.” She reached into her uniform coat and pulled out a flask, the coat having been draped over more comfortable clothes, outside of regulation, to be sure, but she was an aristocrat in another aristocrat’s house.</p><p>Ginny and Hermione both exchanged a look. “That’s got some of the water from the cave in it, doesn’t it?” Ginny asked.</p><p>“Yes, it does. I’ve had a swig every day, and I’m strong enough to move around and sit up all day reading, already.” Larissa leaned back into the chair and stretched, returning the flask to her coat and picking up her tea again. “Is the Battalion well?”</p><p>“Yes, though they’re hoping to move into permanent winter quarters, that would help. The forward positions are very cold, but Bellatrix’s troops haven’t done the slightest thing since we drove them back,” Hermione answered, and taking a sip of her tea, stretched until her neck popped. “I feel guilty to be here, but less guilty since we get to see you again, my friend.”</p><p>“I’m touched,” Larissa laughed. “I do admit, it seemed for a while like it might be the end of me, but I’m trying to convince myself that it was all worth it since it led to a vacation.”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes glittered and she dared to ask, “Well, is it worth it, then?”</p><p>“Give me a few more days, especially now with more company. Though the Lady…”</p><p>“Tonks. Dora. Don’t go all pureblood on me and call me <em>The Lady </em>anything, Larissa,” Dora said as she entered the room, with purple hair and orange eyes.</p><p>“Dora! We came!” Ginny offered with a wave. “Hermione still wishes she was in a tent, though.”</p><p>“It’s part of being a responsible sucker,” Hermione shrugged, watching as Nymphadora took a seat and poured herself some tea as well, stirring jam in thoughtfully as she looked to Hermione.</p><p>“Do you think we failed, honestly?”</p><p>“Absolutely not,” Dora replied. “<em>Absolutely </em>not. The original plan was to stop Bellatrix, true, but giving her information which will lead Voldemort to do what we want is really, sincerely, just as good.”</p><p>“The problem with being such an intellectual, my dear friend, is that you puzzle through the past to try and understand it and improve upon it,” Larissa added languidly, “so you don’t want to admit you did the best in the circumstances, and that’s that.”</p><p>“I’m completely surrounded by people telling me to be happy,” Hermione grumbled for a minute, and then smiled. “Thanks. And thank you, Larissa, for the way you handled that fight.”</p><p>“Nobility demands sacrifice,” Larissa answered, her words hesitant for a moment, her expression dim. “The western purebloods seem to have forgotten that long ago.”</p><p>Master Flyorov arrived, the expression on his face making him look at least twenty years younger, and probably thirty. ‘Grinning like a school-boy’ might well describe it. “Ladies,” he offered a tip of his head. “My apologies for not being here the moment of your return to the Dadiani Manor,” he added as he moved to sit, close to the Samovar.</p><p>“Master,” Hermione began.</p><p>“I think it’s time to at least call me Vasily Gregorovich,” he chuckled. “You found Chernosvyat for me. I can see why your reputation is so great. I will <em>gladly </em>consider all of you my friends until my dying day.”</p><p>“I think you’re overstating it, Vasily Gregorovich,” Hermione shrugged. “It was mostly based on your work, and without, unfortunately, the nuclear attack on Tbilisi, we would have never had our final clue. Have you gone for a look yet?”</p><p>“I have,” Flyorov admitted. “How could I resist? I did not expect to find Koschei’s enchanted skeleton, however. We should bury him, decently.”</p><p>“I suppose it isn’t right to just let Chernosvyat become a tourist attraction,” Dora agreed. “We should ward it. That would be a good project for the winter.”</p><p>“Are you staying here, despite your MinKol duties?” Hermione asked with some surprise.</p><p>“Yes.” Dora shook her head. “This <em>is </em>my duty. We’re taking the Anatolian Strategy of luring Voldemort into confrontation quite seriously.”</p><p>“So we’re just going to wait here and see what happens next?” Ginny looked up from her tea. “Will I have a chance to visit my mum in Nizhniy?”</p><p>“Sure,” Dora acknowledged. “And that’s exactly right. We wait here, and hopefully the plan comes together. If it doesn’t, well, we’re going to have to counterattack and drive the Army back over the Georgian Military Road to keep the railway and pipeline safe. But that will be a decision made in spring.”</p><p>“Either way, we get a justified winter vacation,” Ginny shook her head. “Wasn’t expect I’d ever see one of those again, honestly.”</p><p>“Magic can keep a road passable through the Jvari Pass in winter… But it’s tough going, and I think the appetite for it has gone out of our enemies,” Flyorov shrugged. “We will know soon enough if Madame Lestrange becomes the next one of the Death Eaters executed for incompetence, won’t we?”</p><p>“Yes, with this mission, she’ll have been required to report to Voldemort very soon after the operation ended,” Dora shrugged. “I may then need to go to Nizhniy for a few days myself.”</p><p>Hermione stiffened. Something cold washed over her. “Your Mother?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Vasily Gregorovich frowned. “Forgive me, Madame Tonks, but …”</p><p>Nymphadora closed her eyes. “My mother is Bellatrix Lestrange’s sister. They haven’t spoken in more than twenty years, since she dared to elope and marry…”</p><p>“...Someone like me,” Flyorov nodded.</p><p>“Exactly,” Dora topped her tea off. “So my mother was disowned and her picture burned out of the family tree, literally. They haven’t spoken since Bellatrix married Lestrange and fell in with the Dark Lord, but… She’s still going to cry if her sister dies, and I still need to be there with her, despite all that. That’s just mum, it’s just who she is.”</p><p>“It must be a little hard for Misses Tonks, seeing…”</p><p>“All of those of us around in another culture, who didn’t have to see their wife or husband disowned?” Flyorov shrugged. “Vagaries of fate. As Koschei would have said.”</p><p>“She’s just happen there’s more sensible people in the world generally,” Dora smiled, but she had to reach up to wipe at the tears threatening her eyes. “Though I need to get you to work on the werewolves.”</p><p>Flyorov didn’t quite get it, but Hermione knew what Dora meant. While in many ways the culture of Russian Wizarding was, maybe not more ‘enlightened’, but more ‘practical’, in terms of its own history of compromise and managing the fall of the Tsar and the rise of the Soviet Power, but it had blind spots too. One of those was for werewolves, who were regarded with much more suspicion than in western Europe—and that was saying something.</p><p>“Well, it’s all speculation, anyhow,” the young witch said, running a hand up to her short hair and closing her eyes for a moment. A bone-aching tiredness was beginning to settle over her as she realised she really could sleep in a real bed for days, or even weeks. “Nothing at all might, in fact, happen to Lestrange.” As she put her hand down, she glanced at her sleeved arm for a moment, and then turned back to her tea. “But I do want to see everyone since I’ve got the chance, especially your mother, Dora.” Andromeda Tonks had seen her husband, a non-combatant, tortured to death for being a muggle-born before the final battle. Together, Mother and Daughter had known and knew immense pain.</p><p>“Family is just so complex,” Larissa murmured.</p><p>“She’ll love to see you, Hermione, and so will Teddy.” Nymphadora reached out suspiciously like she were wiping her eyes of tears.</p><p>“Thank you, Dora.” She looked to Ginny. “Going to..”</p><p>“Of course I’m going to take the chance to see everyone that I can. You couldn’t stop me!”</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p><a id="firstHeading1" name="firstHeading1"></a> Bellatrix was slumped into a first class seat at a two-seat table, though the second seat was of course empty, as she rode on the North Country Witcher toward Berwick-upon-Tweed, where Euphemia Rowle was raising her daughter. After about the fifth glass of Macallan Single Malt, her gnawing sense of emotional agony had moderately quieted. A thought had entered her head, and she wanted it to go away, but she’d settle for being utterly drunk instead.</p><p><em>Your own fucking daughter is going to see you this way, </em> a nasty voice in her mind was echoing. She didn’t care. Onwards they blasted through the North Country scenery, hauled by the A4 class <em>Bittern, </em>magically enchanted.</p><p>The introduction of special Wizarding trains that were open only to Wizards and Witches had been one of the benefits of Voldemort’s conquest of Britain, and they now operated like the Hogwarts Express—magically enchanted to force the signals in their favour and compel all other trains to the siding with the inexorable force of powerful spells—while their cornering and running gear had all been magically enchanted so that the <em>Bittern </em>and her rake of ten coaches was presently running at 140 miles on the hour. The only stops between London and Edinburgh were in York, Newcastle and Berwick-upon-Tweed.</p><p>Black Manor was in the mountains near Fair Snape Fell east of Blackpool and north of Blackburn (the names were not a coincidence, considering how ancient the family was, dating to the Norman Conquest). Growing up in Lancashire Bellatrix had always liked the North, and preferred it as a more authentic place for wizarding England than the strange muggle influences everywhere in the South.</p><p>Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the other hand, had been right on the edge of Scotland, and now was a <em>part </em>of Scotland. As they slowed to a stop at the station, and Bellatrix pulled herself up to grab her bags and somehow keep her footing on the way out of the train, she could only muse at that. As it became clear they needed more experienced troops—not ensorcelled goons, but people willing to fight for their own sake—wizarding families with old grudges had promoted the cause of every single national movement in Europe to speak of. With Voldemort’s kind consideration, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Flanders, Brittany, South Tyrol, Sardinia, they had gone on and one with the list of small ethnocultural groups which had abruptly found themselves with independence. Scotland was another. Oh, they were all under Voldemort’s domain, but they had produced a dozen willing divisions of soldiers, arguably better than Janissaries. Their national and cultural autonomy was worth fighting for.</p><p>But what it meant was that the Scottish police were fairly professional, and even coming out of first class, wanted to know why a drunk woman was staggering off the train with nowhere to go. Her wand brought a halt to their questioning, and she carried on with a smirk. Professional, but still muggles.</p><p>But it still left her alone in Berwick-upon-Tweed in the afternoon. Tea still arrived, though it was rare since most of the tea-growing regions of the world were held by their enemies, but Bellatrix managed to find a place serving a cup. She ended up in a Café with a fireplace going, after having tramped through the freshly fallen snow on the sidewalk, trying to sober up next to the fireplace with tea and soda water and a cheese scone, while other people took care to avoid her in the restaurant.</p><p>A cheese scone, at least, was something still in reasonable supply. With a single nuke to the east of Edinburgh—Holyrood was still intact—the whole of the United Kingdom was far better off than the rest of the world. Farm production was as high as it could go, and it guaranteed the wizarding community enough food without rations. It guaranteed the muggle elites could have meat on the table. And it guaranteed that restaurants could remain open, serving things like cheese scones, though meat was very hard to come by. Still, she didn’t mind that. It was good food, and hot tea, and it settled her stomach and restored some stability after the drinking. Between that and some magic, she finally felt well enough to carry on to the Rowle Manor on the outskirts of town. The cold wind served to further clear her mind.</p><p>Satisfied she was as sober as she could get, Bellatrix apparated the rest of the way. It had not taken all that many years to get used to the idea that she could, at will, use magic in front of muggles. Now it proved particularly useful as she approached the Rowle Manor and, arriving at the front entrance, the house elves announced her.</p><p>The severe-looking Euphemia Rowle greeted her. “Madame Lestrange,” she offered. “Welcome, come in and have my hospitality. I was informed by His Court that you would be arriving.”</p><p>“Good.” Bellatrix sauntered in toward the parlor. Euphemia was something of a reluctant host at times, she had taken Delphini out of the chance to gain favour, not out of any motherly sentiments, and so much the better for it, because Bellatrix had never imagined wanting her daughter in the hands of someone else, her unexpected gift with the Dark Lord.</p><p>There was always something like this irritating exchange of pleasantries at the beginning, sitting in the parlour, acting like the world was at peace instead of war. Acting like they had actually done anything to improve the long-term outlook of Pure Blood society.</p><p>“You have been successful on our missions for our Lord?” Ms. Rowle asked idly. She clearly couldn’t care about military affairs or duelling or the complicated geopolitics of the modern world.</p><p>“As always,” Bellatrix answered a little indignantly. “He has given me two weeks leave, before I return to my Army.”</p><p>“Oh.” She seemed genuinely surprised by it. “Will you be visiting again, then, Madame Black? I might add, little Delphini is in her room at the moment, and you are welcome to stay a while, but…”</p><p>“Oh, I will be visiting again,” Bellatrix agreed, “But only when I come back with her. It’s time for a mother-daughter trip.”</p><p>Euphemia looked rather flustered. “I didn’t plan for this. You’ll interfere with her tutoring.”</p><p>“What you’re afraid of,” Bellatrix’s voice keened, “is that my daughter might actually be happy with me and I might actually take her away and gain for her the prestige of being raised as My Lord’s right-hand as <em>she very much should be</em>!”</p><p>“I know that she’ll never be His Lordship’s,” Euphemia sneered. “But she’s still a charity case from His Lordship because he <em>does </em>care about her enough. And you, Madame Lestrange, need to acknowledge...”</p><p>“<em>She’s still MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE.</em>” Bellatrix lunged up. “I know where you’re going with that! You think that a BLACK, a daughter of the oldest of families, has to be kept safe from her own mother and I’m a MADWOMAN, right? Well, do you want mad!? Do you want it!?” There was no more thinking, not in any really substantial way. Euphemia Rowle paled.</p><p>“Mum,” a very small and soft voice said. “Please, mum, the scary bird…”</p><p>Bellatrix whipped her head to look at Delphini, standing at the entrance to the parlour. Her face gentled. “Dearie, don’t worry about it my little one… Bird?”</p><p>“It keeps telling me I’m gonna have a ‘sticky end’, mum…”</p><p>Bellatrix lost it. It was not like stability had ever been her strong suit, and even as she had held herself together in the war, usually, it had provided plenty of opportunities to take herself out on others. She slipped, down, into the comfortable embrace of the madness which was the last gift of Azkaban. “YOU LET MY DAUGHTER BE ROUND AN AUGUREY!? AN AUGUREY!? SHE IS SIX.”</p><p>The fear of what the Augurey meant by that drove her through the roof. “<em>Expelliarmus!</em>”</p><p>Euphemia found herself disarmed before she could finish bringing her wand up, having gone for it when she realised that Bellatrix was becoming violent. But Bellatrix’s violent impulses had outpaced her. “<em>Funis Obscura!</em>” The second spell pinned Euphemia violently back to the chair and left her unable to move, binding her to by magical, invisible ropes as Bellatrix wheeled and spun out more of it, like a spider grasping her prey inside of an invisible but iron-strong mass of spidersilk. Euphemia squeezed and squirmed and struggled against the bonds as real fear crept into her eyes.</p><p>Bellatrix rose and stepped closer to her. “That’s right… That’s right. Be afraid. You’re trying to keep me away from my daughter. Be afraid.” She leaned in close, her voice becoming a hushed whisper, a mockery of sultry. “Be very afraid of the fact that you’re treating my daughter like shit. It seems like if I can’t be her mum then I’m going to have to be your mum and teach you how to behave around my child.”</p><p>Bellatrix pulled back suddenly from Euphemia and raised her wand with a whip like certainty, ignoring completely as Euphemia’s fear broke into a scream of horror: “NO! Merlin, Bellatrix, NO!”</p><p>It was absolutely unavailing. “<em>Crucio!</em>” Handling her wand like a maestro, she tore into Euphemia, trapped, bound for her, again and again, listening to the agonising screams of the woman’s unimaginable anguish.</p><p>Inside of her own tortured mind, Bellatrix could feel calm in the moment. She was absolutely in control, and her victim was hurting. <em>Hurting. </em> Hurting, exactly like everything should be. She could cause as much pain as she wanted! It was all here, in front of her. “ <em>CRUCIO!” </em>It was so much pleasure to say.</p><p>Nobody was going to let her daughter hang around an Augurey and be prophesied a ‘sticky end’. Nobody was going to defy Bellatrix <em>Black. </em> “I’m going to give you nothing…” Bellatrix whispered. “And maybe just take everything.” A pause, and she cackled in glee. “ <em>CRUCIO!” </em></p><p>A small part of her, though, resisted the infinite pleasure of the moment. She was aware, darkly aware, that she was acting like this in defiance to the Dark Lord. She was infuriated, she wanted to be with her daughter, she wanted to raise little Delphini herself. There was, in fact, nothing more important to her than raising Delphini herself this moment, including the Dark Lord’s commands that she not do so. The Dark Lord had placed Delphini with Euphemia Rowle.</p><p>In fact, at the moment, in her heart and soul and even in a moment of madness like this, Bellatrix was rebelling against Voldemort. She had stopped believing that the man who would deny their child, who would deny her her daughter, was in fact worth obeying. The part of her still very much loyal to the Dark Lord rebelled against this, and she slowed the intensity of her savage torture of Euphemia Rowle.</p><p>Then, in that moment, as the intensity of passion waned inside of her, Bellatrix became cognizant of the crying close by. “Mum, mum, please, please, make her stop screaming…? Please?”</p><p>Bellatrix stopped. She trembled. She lowered her wand, and returned it to her side, and picked up her daughter, still trembling uncontrollably. Delphini was crying, and now Bellatrix was crying, too. She squeezed and hugged Delphini and showered her with kisses. “Come on, come on…” Bellatrix retreated to the couch, ignoring the still-sobbing Euphemia Rowle, squirming on the chair.</p><p>“It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright, deary. We’re going to do things together just us girls, promise, we’re going to spend two whole weeks together and nothing is going to separate us. Nothing.”</p><p>But the rebellious part of her reached out and reminded her that actually, she would soon be separated from Delphini. Two weeks, indeed. Or less. <em>He could find out the wand doesn’t work and decide to kill you tomorrow, </em> that wickedly rebellious voice lanced through her. <em>You will never get to see her grow up and become the finest witch of her own age. You will not see her sorted into Slytherin, or graduate. You’ll just be fucking dead, and that will be all there was for fourteen years of Azkaban. Dead. Dead. Dead. </em></p><p>Holding her daughter on Euphemia Rowle’s couch, she cried harder.</p><p>“Mum, mum, can… Can you make the noise stop?”</p><p>“Yes, deary, I can, I will,” Bellatrix answered, forcing herself up and looking into her daughter’s eyes. Rage seized her and she gently put Delphini aside, just to snatch up her wand.</p><p>“<em>Avada</em>…” She trailed off. <em>You will die. You will be killed by Voldemort. You will lose Delphini. </em></p><p>She stopped, and instead raised her wand for another spell. There would be an easy way to fix all of this, not like Voldemort would particularly care that she tortured someone when it gave her more enemies and bound her closer to her dependency on the Dark Lord. But she had to make the crying stop for her daughter, and so she did.</p><p>“<em>Obliviate!</em>” She commanded, and began to work to systematically erase Euphemia Rowle’s memories of the incident, settling, as she finished, on a sleep charm so that she would remember only agreeing to let Delphini go for two weeks, and then taking a nap.</p><p>When she was done, she squeezed Delphini into another hug, a sense of relief and even excitement washing over her. “Come on, deary. Let’s get your things together and we’ll go have an adventure. Is there anything you want to do?”</p><p>Delphini put on a brave face, ignoring for the moment what her mother had done to Euphemia Rowle. “Yes Mum, I want to go play in the snow…”</p><p>“Play in the snow, play in the snow…” Bellatrix smiled brightly as she got up with her daughter and went to her room to help her pack. “Yes, we’ll play in the snow together, deary.”</p><p>Then, with a crushing weight, Bellatrix realised she had just let her daughter, not even six years old, watch her torture someone with the Cruciatus curse. She staggered in Delphini’s room, and then dropped to her knees, and forced herself to start packing as she cried.</p><p>“Mum, what’s wrong?”</p><p>“I…” Bellatrix wiped her eyes and shivered. “I just love you so much.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>A4 class -- a premier class of crack streamlined steam locomotives. They had names, after birds, like Bittern and Mallard and so on. Voldemort's Ministry of Magical Transport seized them to implement regular wizarding rail services to augment the Hogwarts Express, so they have been enchanted to not need coal. <br/>Berwick-upon-Tweed -- a city long disputed between Scotland and England because it is on the north bank of the Tweed, which except by the mouth where Berwick is, is the border between England and Scotland. <br/>Holyrood -- a metonym for the Scottish government, including the Parliament and the Palace. <br/>Cheese scone -- Britain has better access to milk because without nuclear bombs going off everywhere, there isn't much Strontium-40 contamination. However, Britain cannot feed herself, so meat especially is rationed and in very short supply for muggles, especially ones who are not rich.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Vacations</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Fourteen: Vacations</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix had moved to quickly leave the house, leaving Euphemia Rowle asleep in her chair as she took her daughter and her daughter’s suitcase out with her, with Delphini all bundled up against the cold in a good and proper witch’s cloak. She was never prouder of her than seeing her like that, with two suitcases between them, both small and light since they were enchanted to have enough room for all of their things. The House Elves would sooner or later have the story out with Euphemia, but since Bellatrix had restrained herself and not killed the woman, the Dark Lord would do nothing to her.</p><p>She wanted to be as far from the Rowle manor as possible and moved quickly to that effect. Together they first headed back to the café she had gotten her scone in, and got her daughter a currant scone and some hot malted milk, and got herself more tea. Sitting there watching Delphini eat, she couldn’t keep the smile off her face, but she also didn’t have the slightest idea of how she was going to take Delphini to play in the snow. She wasn’t even really sure of how to make it happen.</p><p>So, driven by affection for her daughter, she got up, going back to the counter for another cup of tea, and also to ask the muggle behind it where one could take children to play in the snow. “ Muggle,” she said, trying to be casual, “just where do people take their children to play in the snow?”</p><p>The woman froze. Interactions other than casual purchases with Wizards were potentially very dangerous, and the question was very odd. “Uhh.. Snow parks usually, Ma’am.”</p><p>“Is that so? Where are there snow parks.”</p><p>“Well, I don’t have any kids of my own yet but when I was little my family would travel up to Fort William and go to the one by Ben Nevis,” she said, hesitatingly.</p><p>“Ben Nevis, brilliant. Thank you, muggle.” Bellatrix’s smile, while sweet, was also one of the most hideously dangerous things imaginable. She took her second cup of tea, and wandered back to her table and her daughter’s side. “Delphi, we’re going to a <em> snow park. </em> And we’re going to play in the snow. Together.”</p><p>A bright, wide, innocent grin on her child’s face melted her heart. Bellatrix waited for Delphini to finish eating as she finished her second cup of tea, and off they returned to the train station to wait for the next North Country Witcher to travel on to Edinburgh. “ I would like two tickets on the next North Country Witcher connecting through to Fort William,” she began to the station clerk behind the counter. The great brick station was lovely even by the exacting standards of Pureblood families, though it had not been well kept.</p><p>The clerk began to speak, rather subdued. “I’ll need to see ID, Ma’am…”</p><p>Bellatrix was in no mood to play that game, among other reasons, she didn’t carry ID identifying her as a Wizard, or as a Muggle, or anything else. Other Death Eaters might have uncovered their arm to show the Dark Mark and let the Muggle know precisely how much trouble they were in. But Bellatrix did not uncover her arms. She would never do that.</p><p>Instead she leaned forward and raised her wand. “We’re witches,” she said with a growing, dangerous smile. “So put us on the witch train.” She extended a few high value coins as the man backed down. “First class.”</p><p>“Of course, ma’am.” A nervous pause. “Ma’am, there isn’t a through train on the wizarding services to Fort William tonight, I can only get you as far as Dumbarton, and put you on the morning train from there. ”</p><p>Bellatrix glowered for a moment.</p><p>“If you’d rather stay in Glasgow instead… ”</p><p>“Oh <em> certainly </em> not! But just put me through to Dumbarton, I’ll travel the rest of the myself!” While Edinburgh was pushing it with a child and luggage, she was quite confident of her ability to apparate from Dumbarton to Fort William that night.</p><p>“...Yes, Ma’a m.” Two tickets, one adult, one child, were passed over as well as the change. Bellatrix returned her wand to the holster—those were getting more common these days—and smiled down to Delphini, checking the time on the tickets and comparing it to the ornate old station clock. “Twenty minutes, deary.”</p><p>Bellatrix found a place to sit and created multi-coloured bubbles with her wand that glowed and bounced around as Delphini, entranced, chased after that. When they popped they released a little fanfare.</p><p>Some of the Muggles also waiting for their trains in the station watched with envy, or awe, childlike fascination (especially of course for the children), and some with anger at their overlords simply innocently enjoying themselves in a time of war and uncertainty. She had the kind of ghastly sense not-quite-rightness which came inevitably from drinking five glasses of single malt scotch and then proceeding to take the edge off with (by now, three) cups of tea and a buttered scone. But the torture had comfortably driven back the voices in her head and left her excited for the days to come, all except for this gnawing sense of wrongness, of lurking threat behind the whole situation.</p><p>So she focused on her daughter’s bubbles. Delphini seemed to forget what had happened earlier in the day, and chased after them with a vigorous eagerness to try and obtain all the different fanfares.</p><p>Bellatrix saw one of the muggle children get up and begin to approach the bubbles with her daughter. The boy was a similar age.</p><p>He was also a muggle. A muggle-spawn, getting close to her child.</p><p>Bellatrix hesitated for a moment, and reached for her wand. She briefly considered turning the boy into a cat for a while for her daughter to play with. Then she saw the look of absolutely stricken fear which filled the eyes of the muggle woman, clearly the kid’s mother, who had been looking down at a book, and now looked up to see her son approaching a Witch’s child. A very ominous Witch’s child. The agony in the woman’s eyes, her uncertainty at what was about to happen to her son, struck Bellatrix at that moment. <em> Fuck animals for having emotions, </em> she thought disgustedly, mostly at herself. She lowered her wand, and rose.</p><p>“Come on, Delphi, let’s go out to the platform, our train will be here soon.”</p><p>“But mum, there’s still three more bubbles to get!”</p><p>“Awh, alright deary.” Bellatrix couldn’t bring herself to say no, and anyway, the chance of a meeting with the muggle boy was quickly removed; when she relented, the muggle woman, with relief in her eyes, quickly got up and restrained her son, keeping him properly away from the young witch.</p><p>She waited for Delphini to finish with the bubbles, as the young boy looked on longingly, a bit frustrated in his mother’s arms. Then Bellatrix grabbed her daughter’s hand and firmly envisioned the platform. She apparated with her the short distance out to the train platform, to stand by the plaque declaring that the platform had once been inside the long-demolished Hall of the old Berwick Castle, built by the Scottish King David in the 12 <sup> th </sup> century, and it had been where King Edward had once adjudicated the Crown of Scotland to John Balliol and where he later took the oaths of the Scottish nobility in 1296. Now it was a train platform… Sometimes, Muggles simply had no respect for their own history, Bellatrix thought, idly reading the plaque.</p><p>A few minutes later, right on time, the North Country Witcher, marshalled for the busy evening run with a rake of fourteen coaches marshalled behind the A4 <em> Mallard, </em> came gliding across the Royal Border Bridge, looking so handsome in lively blue as she glided over a viaduct that looked worthy of Rome, and a glaring contrast to the practical electric multiple unit heading south on the “Up” track toward Norfolk; here in Berwick-upon-Tweed the “Up” track became the one they’d be riding on, as the directions were marked toward Edinburgh. Bellatrix remembered that from one time on the Hogwarts express that, as a rebellious sixteen year old, she had snuck through the tender passage from the coaches to the locomotive and started peppering the bemused driver with all kinds of questions about how the Wizarding train dealt with the problem of muggles being all about .</p><p>That felt like a lonely eternity ago, now. An eternity when she had been pretty, and the future was open to the Brightest Witch of Her Age.</p><p>“Mum, is that our train? It’s pretty!”</p><p>“It <em> is </em> pretty, deary.” Bellatrix giggled. “And yes it is. We’ll be to Edinburgh in thirty minutes, and when we change trains there, I’ll get you something in the restaurant car on the second ride.”</p><p>With wide eyes, Delphini watched the beautifully streamlined steam engine at the head of the rake braking. There were no air hoses, the brakes were magically enchanted, and it gave her a magical silence as the grand old locomotive, enchanted for her new working job, glided to stop in the evening just north of the Tweed, with the snow beginning to lightly fall around them again.</p><p>As the doors to the coaches opened, Bellatrix led her daughter aboard with a cheerful smile that only seemed a <em> little bit </em> mad. She was very much confident that they were absolutely going to have a wonderful time playing in the snow. <em> Two whole weeks… </em> Gnawing on Bellatrix inside of her soul was what was going to happen to them after that. A seditious part of her kept reminding her she had to make up her mind, but it was a subject which terrified her to even think about. She wanted to focus on her daughter’s smile, instead, and she did, for as long as she could.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Nizhniy Novgorod. There was something ironic about the unpretentious city with its legendary dourness and lack of nightlife, especially in western cultural stereotypes, actually being the home of Koldovstoretz and the true heart of the Russian Witchcraft community. But perhaps it was very intentional.</p><p>Still, the idea of Andromeda Tonks being a stereotypical <em> nizhegorodka </em> brought a tug of a smile to Hermione’s lips. Actually, as she made her way off the metro train—thanks to the presence of Koldovstoretz and the city’s survival, intact, during the nuclear exchange, it had been a priority for continued expansion of the metro—and exited from the odd soviet-style station with its inward angled walls and and metal-panelled inset light fixtures to an interchange with the tram network, she had to reflect that it was not far from the truth. Andromeda Tonks was apparently mostly raising her daughter in a typical Soviet apartment block— albeit a <em> Stalinki, </em> one of the older ones of high quality.</p><p>Hermione joined the press of people getting on the tram. It was an old Soviet tram, LM-68M type with a pantograph instead of a pole, and everyone crammed in, the young and the old, workers on break going for food, women coming home with their rations for their family, school-children on winter break—a typical midday in Nizhniy Novgorod. They wore all their heavy clothes, though after five years with few supplies of clothes for the civilian population, many jackets and shirts and blouses and skirts were quite threadbare, the western-style jeans faded and sometimes ragged. The tram itself had certainly seen better days.</p><p>Outside, there were very few cars on the roads anymore. The official vehicles drove fast, the buses had plenty of room to keep schedule, as did the trams. Private car use was almost nonexistant, and those that remained were those that could be maintained, a melange of 90s foreign imports and Soviet vehicles. The tram lines on the other hand were wildly busy, it looked like there was almost a traffic jam of them. Getting on and looking for a seat or even just somewhere to stand, the embarrassing part of boarding the tram was how others stood aside for her, as a soldier of some rank, with medals on her chest. They made way for her to get a seat. She tried to refuse, but then she saw the person she would be sharing it with.</p><p>He was an old man, in his uniform, covered with medals on his chest, but his eyes were still a sharp and clear blue, alive with intelligence . “ Come on, lass, they’ll never stop,” he laughed. “So just sit.”</p><p>“Alright,” Hermione agreed, and moved to sit with him. “Hermione Alanovna,” she introduced herself. “I’m an English refugee.”</p><p>“But you fight,” he smiled. “I fought with the English, too. Ivan Fyodorovich.”</p><p>“The Great Patriotic War,” Hermione nodded.</p><p>“Indeed. Your Russian is good,” he added with a pleasant old smile. “ On leave from the front, then?”</p><p>“Yes, the Caucasus,” Hermione answered automatically. She tried to think of the war from the muggle perspective. “I’ve got a squad who covers me,” she said, “and they’re all good guys like you can’t believe. The sergeant who leads them, Vasya, tough guy, you know, he’s never let me down, even when I asked him to do the impossible.”</p><p>“I understand, lass.” he smiled. “It’s that way, too, when I fought. We’ll get you to London, won’t we?”</p><p>“I really look forward to it,” Hermione admitted, with a brightening smile. Ivan Fyodorovich’s grin was infectious.</p><p>“Visiting family, then?”</p><p>“I am,” Hermione answered, her voice, for a second, faltering. “As close as I have to it left, away from the front.”</p><p>Her newfound friend, who she would likely never talk to again, but was still a real friend, listened to her confession, and all it meant: That she was closer to her comrades than anyone else, that she was nearly an orphan, but there were still people away from the front that she cared about, still people that she fought for.</p><p>All of that, they shared, just not at the same time. He grinned, as if he had a very special secret to share, and Hermione leaned close, and he whispered.</p><p>“Just so you know, when the first spring comes after the war is over, it’s all worth it. Remember that, Comrade Witch.”</p><p>Hermione couldn’t help it. When she got to her stop and disembarked the tram, she had a smile on her face.</p><p>The drab grey apartment block in front of her still had the remnants of the old slogan <em> Lenin Lives</em>! on one of the sides, but new banners and slogans for the war effort had mostly replaced the old. She went in and went up to the fifth floor, where she used the knocker to rap on the door to what was Andromeda Tonks’ apartment.</p><p>The woman, with her dark hair and dark eyes, though the former not quite as dark as Bellatrix’s, answered the door a moment later. For a moment, she didn’t recognise the young woman in front of her. Then she reached out, and folded Hermione into a tight hug that shocked the soldier.</p><p>“Hermione Granger! Come in, come in, I was expecting you from the message that Dora sent. Come on. Are you well? ” She virtually pulled Hermione in, speaking in the old familiar sounds of English. “Come on, I have some tea.”</p><p>“I’d love it, Madame Tonks,” Hermione anwered, addressing the woman whose clothes still marked her as a Witch, whose face had the lines of stress of someone who had lived through her husband being tortured to death, fleeing across half the world, in her mid-forties, to raise her grandson mostly alone with her daughter constantly at risk in a war. But for all that, she seemed happy.</p><p>Andromeda gave her a side-eye. “It’s Dromeda to my friends. Come on, let’s get you tea. And probably lunch, also. Did you arrive by Floo?”</p><p>“Yes, via Orenburg,” Hermione answered as Andromeda headed into the kitchen.</p><p>“I assume you’re familiar with the vagaries of Russian cooking?” Dromeda asked as she light off the gas for one of the burners on the stove.</p><p>“I love all of it,” Hermione grinned and leaned against the counter as the youngest Black sister turned around and pressed a cup of tea into her hands— complete with evaporated milk . Hermione grinned. “Where’s Teddy?”</p><p>Dromeda smiled as she sliced off pieces of Doctor’s Sausage while frying some onion and potato skins on the range. “He’s at a play-time with the other kids in the apartment block. He’ll be back in time for you to see him— he just absolutely loves playing in the snow with the other kids, you know . When was the last time…?”</p><p>“It was when we were both still in Moskva, when you were living in that converted hotel, and I was undergoing my advanced officer’s training,” Hermione answered, taking a blessed sip of her tea. “He was so small, then.”</p><p>“He was,” Dromeda agreed with a faintly distant expression. “He was. Ah well.” A sheepish look. “I’d be at work myself, but my shifts rotate at the GAZ plant, so I have some weekdays off instead. I’m the plant supervisor for enchanting of armoured vehicles.”</p><p>No Wizard or Witch could be <em> not </em> mobilised for the War Effort in some way, and so even Andromeda Tonks, with a child to care for on the behest of her daughter, had to find some way to contribute to the war effort. In this case, Hermione knew how important it was, since otherwise the enemy could easily destroy armoured vehicles and tanks with spells. In particular, it was incredibly mind-numbing work, casting the same set of spells over and over again in the same place, day in and day out.</p><p>It would have driven Hermione nuts to be stuck doing that, she’d sooner be on the front like she was. But Dromeda Tonks was executing a necessary and important task, and seemed happy with the opportunity.</p><p>“It helps, you know. Never doubt that. When a spell bounces off a BTR or what have you, there’s a dozen men who aren’t dead, or worse than dead, and it heartens all of us. Especially because the enemy’s enchantment fails often.”</p><p>For a moment, Andromeda had a weird expression on her face. “Well, about that. My sister will be coming over in a bit, and I apologise, but I wasn’t sure exactly when you were going to arrive…”</p><p>Hermione was rather confused by what relationship Narcissa Malfoy had with the weakness of enchantments on tanks and armoured fighting vehicles with Voldemort’s forces. “ I don’t really mind. I can be cordial,” she made herself smile. “It seems Dora is with Draco, after all, and even I … It seems he’s tried to prove himself pretty hard.”</p><p>“He has,” Andromeda agreed. “Actually, it was Draco who got Cissa to talk to me,” Andromeda began, and then trailed slowly off, before saying with a sigh, “I had never expected that to happen ever again, so that’s something.”</p><p>Hermione didn’t really know what to say as she took the plate—a simple sausage sandwich with a single slice of bread, and the fried potato skins and onions on the side—and followed Andromeda with her tea. She saw one room of the apartment had been converted into a potions room, where Andromeda had a cauldron bubbling away, which she quickly ducked in to check on before following Hermione to the little living room/study where they at least had a table.</p><p>“I keep busy providing useful things to everyone in the flat that I can,” Andromeda explained as she moved to sit with her own cup and portion. “With the rationing so tight, I can at least make peoples’ lives a little better, there.”</p><p>“As if you wouldn’t keep busy with the defence production job and a grandson to raise…” Hermione murmured, respectfully. “I think you’re an example.”</p><p>Andromeda raised her hand. “No flattery, please. It’s just to keep from worrying, I suppose, or ruminating. Both are bad in these times.”</p><p>“ True. When I get that way myself, I have a smoke and some tea. If there’s doubts, it’s best to ignore them.” Hermione smiled wryly and looked up to see the hesitant expression on Andromeda’s face. “I know it’s perfectly ghastly for someone as young as me to say something like that, but it’s also perfectly true.”</p><p>“You’ve always been an intellectual.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Hermione paused for a moment and reached up, pulling off her uniform hat and setting it to the side, running a hand through her short hair. “There’s something I wanted to talk about. It’s about Dora.”</p><p>“Well, by all means, Hermione.”</p><p>“I’m worried about her. She uses the Killing Curse to fight back against Voldemort, now. That’s …”</p><p>“Not my daughter the almost-unbearably silly metamorphmagus Hufflepuff? No, not so much anymore,” Andromeda agreed, exhaling slowly, closing her eyes for a moment, drinking the last of her tea to collect her thoughts. “My lovely daughter is Nymphadora the Silovik now. She goes to the meetings with the men who have only one eye with lightning in that eye, and the men with beady little eyes and expressions which make you think them inhuman, and there they talk about things which in other times most sensible people would have thought evil. But she was an Auror. Almost everyone who was her comrade died and then … The Battle of Hogwarts. Yet because of that, I don’t think she’s changed. In fact, I think if anyone is going to use the killing curse, a Hufflepuff with a sense of humour would be the least damaged by it.” She reached up and put her hands over her face and started to cry. “Of course, I’m scared for her, but if she wasn’t there, there would just be someone else’s daughter there, doing the same things… Doing whatever it takes to win.”</p><p>Hermione reached out and grabbed one of Andromeda’s hands, and held the elder woman’s hand while she cried. Andromeda wiped her eyes with the other and smiled. “Still, thank you for coming to me as her front-comrade, and telling me about it. I can at least provide her support. If we are fortunate, there’s going to be a long time for all of us to put ourselves back together in when this is over.”</p><p>“I’d like to hope so,” Hermione ducked her head, sheepishly, “but it seems very far away right now.”</p><p>The knocker on the door snapped with authority. Andromeda finished wiping her eyes, and grinned wryly. “That will certainly be Cissa, unless Teddy has gotten himself into something. Come on.”</p><p>Hermione followed Andromeda to the door. Andromeda opened it, and there stood a woman for whom Hermione felt many complicated emotions. She remembered her from the Battle of Hogwarts, from her manor before that, from being an enemy, and then being an ally just in time for it not to matter…</p><p>And then she came to appreciate the strength of the woman who had lost her husband, who led the exiles through the nuked-out oblivion of Europe to safety. The quiet strength of Narcissa Malfoy in motivating Draco, giving him the spark which led him to join the Armed Forces and to have now fought heroically in the Scandinavian front, where command of the Baltic Sea had let the forces of the CIS go over onto the offensive.</p><p>She knew that Narcissa lived a different life than Andromeda, but she had not been expecting this. Before them, Narcissa was wearing a crisp, high-end Muggle woman’s business suit. She had instead expected Russian wizarding robes, considering she was apparently living at the Naryshkin Manor. The prominent Union Jack lapel pin left Hermione dumbfounded for a moment. “Madame Malfoy?”</p><p>“Councillor of Magic Granger, a pleasure to see you again,” Narcissa said with her crisp formality as she stepped in and gave her sister a brief hug. “Thank you, Andy, for letting me come visit even so.”</p><p><em> Andy. </em> Hermione realised it was a private nickname of Andromeda from her sister, that because of their long separation, she had never heard used before. Perhaps Andromeda had wanted no-one to use it, because it reminded her of a time when Narcissa was, in fact, close to her and her sister, and had not watched as she was burned off the family tapestry. Hermione just ended up trailing along in a state of some confusion, still. She had not imagined the pureblood Narcissa Malfoy ever adapting like that, but she seemed determined to fit in to upper-crust Russian muggle society. <em> What’s with the pin, though? We refugees are not the most popular group ever. </em></p><p>“I have to insist you have some tea, Cissa,” Andromeda nodded firmly, and refilled Hermione and her own cups at the same time as her smile got a little dangerous. “Narcissa, here, Hermione,” she explained to the questions that, if unspoken, were written all over the young woman’s face, “is the head of the British Government in Exile.”</p><p>In retrospect, Hermione didn’t believe her eyes had ever been quite so large before.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Ben Nevis is the tallest mountain in the UK, there's a ski-park nearby, though it's ironically not actually on Nevis. But close enough. <br/>Up/Down tracks -- In England the track where traffic normally travels /toward/ London is the Up track, and the Down track is away from London. This reverses at the border with Scotland on the East Coast Main Line, the main rail route from London to Edinburgh and the one the Hogwarts Express travels on as well, where the Up track heads toward Edinburgh and the Down track away from Edinburgh.<br/>nizhegorodka -- female resident of the city of Nizhniy Novgorod. <br/>Stalinki -- rather spacious apartments for intelligentsia and apparatchiks built during Stalin's rule of the USSR. Contrast with the much more utilitarian Khrushchyovka built during Khrushchev's time. <br/>GAZ -- a massive conglomerate for the manufacture of military and civilian vehicles.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Family</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Fifteen: Family</p><p> </p><p>“You mean the head of the Ministry of Magic in Exile?” Hermione clarified after a moment, as Andromeda seemed to enjoy taking advantage of the distraction to refill her tea.</p><p>Hermione couldn’t really believe that Narcissa Malfoy had gotten the position. She trusted her to fight for her interests, which were against Voldemort, to save her son’s skin and her own. Maybe even to get revenge for Lucius. She didn’t trust her to lead a government, even a paper government, and couldn’t imagine anyone else doing the same.</p><p>“No, she meant the head of the British Government in Exile,” Narcissa said with perhaps a trace of bemusement creeping into her voice. “Though we don’t have our own military forces, it even means, Councillor Granger, that I represent your interests.”</p><p><em> No wonder Nymphadora didn’t bring this up. I can’t imagine her being anything other than furious about it, </em> Hermione listened in confusion. “...Why, Madame Malfoy?” Hermione asked.</p><p>“Someone needed to organise for the future when we’ve defeated Voldemort,” the Pureblood woman answered, neutrally, with a remarkable composure for being questioned by a mudblood. “As it happened, most British citizens who are not under Voldemort’s power escaped east from Europe and ended up in Russia and someone needed to represent their interests internationally.”</p><p>“...So you’re leading the muggles, too?”</p><p>“The Britons,” Narcissa answered mildly. There <em> was </em> the hint of something cheeky in her restrained, aristocratic hauteur, and it left Hermione wondering if she were being sarcastic. But she continued on, perfectly composed, nonetheless. “The reality is that we’re never going to put the Wizarding community back together the way it was before the War. There will never be a statute of magical secrecy again. We’re going to have to live together, and that raises the prospect of magical life being restrained by Parliament. Quite frankly, the British Wizarding community, to most of the world, will look like the problem when we are victorious. Voldemort grew out of us. Koldovstoretsy can point to the fact that they rallied to the flag one and all the moment the nukes flew. British Wizards… Can point to providing eighty percent of Voldemort’s Death Eaters.”</p><p><em> Including your sister, </em> Hermione thought, but was not rude enough to say, as she listened, intent.</p><p>“Worse, many of Voldemort’s most reliable human troops are Britons. Britain, unlike the other countries of the world, is intact thanks to Voldemort’s magic. British industry provides the guns and arms to fuel his conventional war machine as well.” Narcissa languidly raised her tea, eyeing Hermione over the cup. “After a very long set of conversations with the British-raised Count Tolstoy, it became quite apparent that unless someone took control of the entire exile community and developed a plan to keep the peace in Wizarding Britain after the war, and deal with the rest of the world’s demands for justice, our entire way of life would die. There was nobody else suitable to lead it, and as it turns out, I prevailed on the <em> entire </em> British exile community that my strategy was the best for preserving the British way of life and presenting a united front to the world through the war.”</p><p>“And, you and Dromeda..”</p><p>“Everything has changed,” Narcissa simply said, and nodded to her sister. “If I’m going to call Muggles ‘citizens’ and ‘Britons’, I’m not going to keep my sister cut off over what the past was like. She’s endured enough.”</p><p>Andromeda smiled tiredly, but nodded her agreement, as she looked on to Hermione. “Two Widows, together in middle age.”</p><p>Hermione leaned back in her chair, trying to puzzle through all of it. On the face of it, it made perfect sense that if Narcissa was going around treating Muggles like equals, that she would renew her relationship with her sister. It was a powerful symbol that things were different, and anything else would cast suspicion on her. But it seemed entirely too ‘pat’ in some respects. Still, either Andy thought it was genuine, or she was too desperate and lonely for companionship to care.</p><p>“Does this mean you’re technically my Commander-in-Chief?” Hermione finally asked, deciding on some question, any question, to distract herself from the rabbit hole that her thoughts were otherwise carrying her down.</p><p>“No. Unfortunately, the CIS chose to treat those exiles who volunteered as citizens. We’re also not trusted enough to have our own Free British units in the field. However, we do contribute to the war effort in other ways. But of course, I cannot say more.”</p><p>“Oh, I understand. Well, congratulations, Madame Malfoy. I have to say, I hope you succeed. Going home to Britain isn’t something I’ve let myself dream about, these past four years.”</p><p>“Perhaps we can change that for you.”</p><p>“Perhaps so,” Hermione smiled, even if she didn’t really feel it. “If you’d excuse me… Dromeda, Madame Malfoy. I’d like to go have a smoke, and I can bring Teddy in after his playtime, too.”</p><p>“Oh, sure!” Andy grinned. “They’ll let you, you’re a woman in uniform. The combination means you can get away with almost anything,” she laughed.</p><p><em> Not as much as Narcissa Malfoy, apparently, </em> Hermione thought as she grabbed her coat, headed out of the apartment, down the stairs, and out into the bright sun, the light snow having stopped. She put her sunglasses on to protect her eyes from the glare, and struck up one of her belomors as soon as she stepped outside. Then she wandered behind the apartment building to find where the children were playing, while enjoying the nicotine and trying to mentally sort through what she had just heard.</p><p>She found them, doing everything children do in the snow, or finishing up playing, anyhow, and stood for a moment. Hermione never felt more distant from children at that moment, she’d never had the chance to dream of a family, she’d gone straight from being a girl to a soldier.</p><p>A shrug. <em> That’s the way it is. </em> She stepped forward. “Teddy… Teddy?” Nobody answered as she walked up. Pausing again for a moment, she realised that Teddy Lupin had spent his entire life in Russia, which sent Hermione down the fascinating rabbit-hole of Russian dimunitives. His legal name might be ‘Edward’, but his entire family called him ‘Teddy’, which sounded more like <em> Theodore, </em> so he probably ended up a... “Fed’ka!”</p><p>That got the attention of young Teddy, and he turned to look. Hermione stepped closer to one of the older women watching them. “I’m a close friend of his mother,” she explained.</p><p>The woman laughed. “Oh, let him visit his family’s friends, then. Fedka’s a lively one!”</p><p>The boy came up to her. He spoke to her in Russian, as comfortably as if he had been born to the tongue. “ Soldier, soldier, do you know my mommy? She’s away at the front.”</p><p>“I do, Fedka,” she answered. “We’re friends, and front-comrades. I’m your auntie Hermione. Come on, we’ll go to your grandmother and grandaunt Narcissa, too!” <em> Harry would have thought he was adorable, he would have been so happy that Remus had a legacy and that he was happy and healthy. They both would have. </em></p><p>But she didn’t cry, for Teddy’s sake. Instead, she let him wear her hat, and gave him a salute when he put it on, hanging down and almost covering his eyes. But with a huge grin, he ran around to his friends, and declared he was a soldier now, before heading back to Hermione’s side, so that together they headed back into the apartment block.</p><p>Arriving back in Andromeda’s flat, the woman paused for a moment at seeing her grandson in the hat. In that moment, Hermione regretted it, in turn, herself.</p><p>But Andromeda rallied, and smiled. She picked her grandson up. “My little hero. Say hello to Aunt Cissa for me?”</p><p>“Auntie Cissy!”</p><p>Hermione saw the genuine expression of happiness on Narcissa’s face, and it reminded her that, in the way that she had begun to accept Draco as a comrade in their shared struggle, the woman who had given birth to him was not irredeemable, either. Maybe her plan even had some merit.</p><p>As Andromeda gave her grandson a Bulochki as a treat after his play, Narcissa leaned closer to Hermione for a moment. “Draco has been selected for advanced training like you were. Will you meet with him when he comes back? It was very hard in Copenhagen, and I think he’d appreciate it.”</p><p>“Yes, I will.” Hermione smiled a little, that wasn’t hard…</p><p>“Would you tell me what happened with Bellatrix?” Narcissa asked next, and Hermione froze.</p><p>Andromeda shot her sister a sharp look, and Narcissa waved off the question.</p><p>Hermione, mercifully saved by Andy from having to come up with a story, wondered what had, in fact, happened with Bellatrix.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Though it didn’t seem like a problem to Bellatrix, one could easily see the nature of Voldemort’s regime in how the muggle families whose children were <em> also </em> playing on the Nevis Range ski resort on Aonach Mòr reacted to the presence of the Witch and her daughter. Bellatrix’s mere presence guaranteed that the kids centre at the ski resort was being rather thinly used, letting Delphini try out every one of the muggle contrivances for playing in the snow that she wanted to, but also rather leaving her alone, as Bellatrix watched her carefully like a hawk, lest the muggle children get too close to her daughter.</p><p>The muggle children started to reappear when Bellatrix took Delphini out for a break, going into the warm lodge. Bellatrix ignored that, and focused on the menu for her daughter. “What do you want, Delphi?"</p><p>“Hot chocolate and… What’s that, mum?”</p><p>“A baked tattie, it’s something Scottish muggles eat,” Bellatrix answered idly, reaching down to hold her daughter’s hand. “You can have whatever you want on the menu, deary. I think all they have is Scottish muggle food, though; we’re at a muggle café in Scotland.”</p><p>“I’d like a baked tattie with coronation chicken and a hot chocolate,” Delphini enunciated, stepping forward to look up to the counter.</p><p>The woman behind it nervously looked at Bellatrix for confirmation, and got the gleam of the woman’s grin as a reply. “Make that two of each,” Bellatrix said, sounding barely more than a child herself for a moment.</p><p>Soon enough, mother and daughter were giggling over hot chocolate and baked tatties covered with coronation chicken, which probably anyone except members of the middle class who thought they were being sophisticated and Witches who didn’t know any better would have found mildly absurd. But Bellatrix was over the moon. She’d tortured Euphemia Rowle for that damned bird and then absconded with her daughter for a fortnight in the Scottish Highlands. It was a thoroughly carefree experience, giggling and making faces to Delphini in the foam from her hot chocolate.</p><p>There was something so disarming about it that the muggles actually felt comfortable sitting in the café with them to have lunch. Were it not for the strange dress of the mother and daughter, they might even have just been one particularly batty middle-aged woman spending time with her absolutely adorable daughter.</p><p>But as the muggles pressed close again, Bellatrix felt a creeping irritation at them. When she saw her little Delphi, there was a part of her mind that flashed back to her sister, Andromeda. To burning her picture off the family tapestry. Closeness to Muggles, on the part of her beautiful, beautiful daughter, was not something she wanted to fathom.</p><p>Managing to let Delphini finish her food, they got up to leave, and Bellatrix guarded her protectively when she went to the loo. There, her expression kept the other mums out. Then they returned to the kiddie slope.</p><p>Standing around watching her daughter slide down the kiddie slope on a sled, and then get fitted up for skis (the rental policy of leaving an ID behind had been quickly waived with a wave of her wand!), Bellatrix found herself not caring at all about the cold. She was just enjoying her daughter with a bright expression of awe and happiness on her face stumble around in the white powdery stuff.</p><p>It did leave her time to ruminate, though, which wasn’t necessarily good. She kept thinking back to the words of Koschei’s enchanted skeleton, and the words of Hermione and Nymphadora. <em> Nymphadora, my half-blood bint of a niece. </em> The slang of her soldiers provided a savage rejoinder. She didn’t need to trust anything the half-blood said.</p><p>But anything they said at all might be suspect, sure, but it might be true at all. It gnawed at her, and it still did, that the <em> Rabdos </em> of Koschei the Deathless might prove useless to Voldemort. Voldemort had just been growing so withdrawn. He cared only for his own experiments, and he had been seizing more and more of the London districts around Westminster for privacy and vaults and places to support his research into the Dark Arts. It was common knowledge that Fenrir brought back people, people who had not done anything wrong (muggles, granted), and they did not leave again, even beyond the work which created the Garou.</p><p>Bellatrix didn’t really care about any of that, but she knew that the Dark Arts were far more important to Voldemort than she was… Than Delphini was. That last one incensed her immensely. One of the justifications for a divorce with custody in the Wizarding world even among pureblood families was evidence of disregard for one’s heirs, and Voldemort was doing exactly that. Of course, they had never been married, and he was the Dark Lord. That was the point. He could do whatever he wanted as the Dark Lord.</p><p>Like kill her because she had failed.</p><p>Like kill Delphini because she was a threat, because the heir presumptive to someone who was going to live forever could only be a threat.</p><p>She clenched her hands and grimaced. <em> I need to find out if it’s true… And Hogwarts is nearby. The library might just say something. </em></p><p><em> What if it did</em>? The voice in her head asked, well, one of many voices there had been, but certainly the most insistent at the moment. The rebellious voice.</p><p>Bellatrix wasn’t prepared to be honest with herself about that.</p><p>Behind her, a voice abruptly jolted her from her reverie. “Not much of a skiier yourself?”</p><p>“My daughter wanted to play in the snow,” Bellatrix answered, though a curl of cold iron crept into her voice toward the end, at being questioned by a muggle.</p><p>“She looks to be havin’ fun,” the voice sagely agreed.</p><p>Bellatrix forced herself not to turn around, out of the conviction that actually engaging in eye contact with the muggle would only make him refuse to leave for longer. Quite irritatingly, she was certain that a Killing Curse or Cruciatus would result in Delphini’s day being ruined. “What are you implying, Muggle?” She asked, her voice dropping to a dangerous tone.</p><p>“Y’could learn to ski yourself, ma’am,” the man ventured. “It’s right easy enough for yer daughter.”</p><p>Bellatrix’s eyes widened. Now she really wanted to blast the muggle into oblivion, but she was also being challenged. So far, even at war she had proved herself better than the muggles trained from a young age to practice it. There was absolutely no reason that she couldn’t learn to ski, just like her daughter. “Where do adults… learn to ski?”</p><p>“We have somethin’ called the ‘bunny slope’,” he answered.</p><p>“Then show it to me.” She waved to Delphini. “You’ll be fine, dear! Just don’t let the muggles anywhere near you! I’ll be back in a bit.”</p><p>Delphini waved back, and Bellatrix, set off to prove to the muggles that she could learn to ski.</p><p>The instructor who had been lured into getting her away from the kiddie slope so that she wouldn’t keep ruining the day of all the guests with families left the scene really feeling that had been worth more than the two hundred pound bonus his boss had promised him! Shame, though. The girl really was a sweetheart.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>After a few days in Nizhniy Novgorod, Narcissa had used a portkey she had access to for teleporting quickly back to Astana, and then made her way back home via apparating to her home after checking in at the State Kazakh MinKol headquarters. She ended up with a stack of file folders to go through, naturally. Around her, Astana had survived as well as Nizhniy Novgorod. The entire city served as the headquarters of the CIS war effort, and buzzed with the expected level activity as the Confederacy continued to work on restoring the Soviet War Economy that had been so heavily damaged by the dissolution eight years before the war had begun, and by the nuclear blows four years prior. </p><p>Somehow, they had come together, and fought on. Narcissa admired their resiliency, in the abstract. Narcissa had ended up with half of a small and tidy two-story house, with faded but elegant ornamentation. It was nothing like the Malfoy Manor, but it was charming, in a district where the homes themselves were mostly now inhabited by refugees and soldiers and civil servants on assignment to the CIS government, where effort at repairing and improving the structures was a past-time during the brief periods of rest, limited by the lack of supplies. Her muggle neighbours were an Admiral and his wife, a biologist who was now working as a technician at a local hospital, and she'd humoured them by repairing some of the ornamentation on their side of the house, so it glowed with multicoloured lights to illuminate the lock on the door after dark--they thought this was a much greater gift than it was.</p><p>The house had been in poor condition when they arrived, but Mardy had soon set it right, with Narcissa taking some weekends to join the effort, and make it into more of a home fit for Draco. The house dated from Stalin's era, and probably having once housed a KGB officer and his family responsible for the relocation of Volga Germans to the region; she didn’t really pay that much attention but it was impossible to avoid overhearing old stories sooner or later. The House Elf Mardy had somehow followed the Malfoys out here, so that she at least had one of her elves to serve her, and Narcissa kept a bedroom for Draco, though he had essentially not used it. The right bank, where the house was, was better sheltered from the bitterly cold winds, but it was one of the coldest capital cities in the world.</p><p>Mardy had a glass of hot milk appear almost on the moment she arrived, the thick baked milk so beloved, sweet and refreshing. Narcissa took it and settled in to the chair in her study. The desk sat next to windows looking out over the Esil River, starting to ice up. It was a far cry from Malfoy Manor, but it was close to the seat of power and that would do.</p><p>Narcissa had really loved Lucius, as love went. But life did not work out the way it was supposed to for many people. Now that included her and her son. That had included her husband. She supposed in a way it had included both of her sisters, as well.</p><p>Perhaps not Bellatrix. It seemed like a loveless, childless marriage and a servant to the Dark Lord was exactly what Bellatrix had always been meant for. But somewhere inside, Bellatrix had doubtless wanted something else. The difference, as Narcissa saw it, was that unlike her older sisters, she had been practical about her roles and responsibilities.</p><p>When Draco had made his choice, when the Dark Lord had won anyway, when their family was trapped as traitors, when Lucius made his choice—Narcissa had herself, and her son. She thought it was sometime in the railway wagon travelling east through Poland in that first winter, when she saw the muggles with their skin sloughing from their bodies, in shambling heaps of the dying, exposed directly to the nuclear hellfire, that something had broken inside of her. But it was not her strength, or her practicality.</p><p>It was the pride in her soul that stood in the way of those things once again asserting themselves. Her love for Draco would guide her, and she would grasp her fate tightly, and not look back. That was the decision that had carried her to her role within the Government-in-Exile, and then assuming its leadership after gaining the support of Nursultan Nazarbayev himself. The wily old Kazakh muggle was another reason the entire war effort that stood between her son and her husband’s fate in fact remained intact, and Narcissa had come, in a grudging way, to appreciate him.</p><p>The fact was, they were going to win, or they were going to die. But winning wouldn’t be everything. People would remember that her son had been on the ‘wrong’ side. They would remember that the House of Malfoy had served Voldemort, before they had served the cause of his enemies. Muggles could be incredibly vindictive, even if they had no prison quite so horrifying as Azkaban.</p><p>Narcissa inked her quill and began to write out a letter in magic ink to one of her subordinates, the one in charge of the Special Operations Directorate. Th at was the one in charge of those brave wizards--and muggles-- who resisted Voldemort from behind his lines.</p><p>Narcissa intended to be the one with her hands on the levers of power when the fighting finally stopped. It was the only way she would really be able to keep Draco safe. And if that meant consorting with muggles like equals, speaking their dialect, making their press appearances, compromising with their agendas, so be it. That determination had carried her to form this government, to meet the King in Melbourne, to devote herself to the muggle arts of politics.</p><p>But the longer she showed up for muggle functions in a muggle business suit, the less hating her sister made sense. In fact, being seen with Andromeda in public wasn’t the social death it was before; it was instead a powerful propaganda tool. Her renewed relationship with her elder sister had <em> started </em> that way, but as she finished the letter and settled back to finish her mug of baked milk (which could not be obtained at many places closer to the front), she had to admit she had genuinely rekindled her relationship with her sister, which had once been so strong. Indeed, they had rekindled it to the point that she had been irritated Granger had been there distracting from their time together. If only she could get Andromeda to move to Astana with her, further from the front. But Muggles didn’t like family serving together in government, and her sister insisted on doing something useful. And her niece likely still hated her.</p><p>For a moment, in the bitter cold, Narcissa opened her window and let the owl carrying the message depart. It was a <em> Strix Nebulosa, </em> and perfectly happy in the cold. Securing the window, she waited a moment for the space heaters to catch up, and then went to change into something less muggle for the evening. She did very much wish that Andromeda was there.</p><p>But the restoration of her relationship with her middle sister had made her think of someone else too. The eldest Black sister: Bellatrix. She had been fighting in the Caucasus, but Hermione wouldn’t tell her a single thing about it. It was probably for the best. Sooner or later, Bellatrix would die, or else they’d win, and she and Draco and Andromeda and everyone else with a lick of sense would <em> wish </em> Bellatrix had died. Her sister was insane, too, and there was nothing she could do about that anymore.</p><p><em> That isn’t true. </em> Indeed, Narcissa knew it wasn’t true the moment she had thought about it. Once the Black sisters had been close, and Narcissa remembered those days with a revived ache in her heart now that could sit in an old apartment in Nizhniy Novgorod and share tea with Andy. Unfortunately, just like there had been no way to save Lucius, there was nothing to even think about in the matter. But it would lead to some inquiries, and those she could complete before she went into work the next day, at the headquarters of the Council for the Occupied Nations.</p><p>As Narcissa slipped off the muggle clothes and put on something more decent, alone in the silent apartment, she reached out to sort through a pile of old pictures that Mardy had saved when disapparating away from Malfoy Manor. One of them was of her with her sisters together. One of them was of Bellatrix alone. It was one of the very fancy photographs, enchanted to act like a painting, taken by a professional, and very nearly as expensive as a painting.</p><p>“Bella.”</p><p>“Going to ever get around to putting me back up, Cissy?” The photograph pouted.</p><p>“I might, actually,” Narcissa admitted with her sadness evident in her eyes.</p><p>Fifteen year old Bellatrix shook her head. “I’ll believe it when it happens. What’s got you so off, anyway?”</p><p>“I’m worried about the future,” Narcissa replied, shaking her head. “Worried about my son. He might already be dead and I wouldn’t even know, but as long as he’s fighting… That could happen at any minute.”</p><p>Photograph-Bellatrix sniffed. “There’s no accounting for luck, but I’ve always made my own, and I’m sure Draco can, too.”</p><p>“Bella,” Narcissa answered after a moment, changing the subject. “What would you do for your daughter?”</p><p>“I have a daughter?” Photograph-Bellatrix looked curiously up, out of the past. “Anything. And I’d do it,” she winked, “just as wildly as I do anything else.”</p><p>Narcissa took a deep breath, and quietly set the photograph back down.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Narcissa Malfoy -- How did she do this!? Answer: She was very motivated, and more will be revealed as we go on. She will also be a point of view character from here on out.<br/>Count Tolstoy -- a real person descended from the Tolstoy family, exiled to the UK at the Russian Revolution.<br/>Exile government -- Essentially an organisation to represent the interests of Britain in the future, in exile, to the allies on the anticipation of victory. Britain's is especially complex as it is seen as the "home" of Voldemort.<br/>Teddy's nickname -- the child's dimunitive of Fyodor aka Theodore, which is Teddy sounded like it was short for to his friends, so it stuck even though it's technically wrong. Sometimes these things happen, so he ended up "Fedka". Older in life if it still stays true he would be "Fedya" -- you get the idea by now!<br/>Astana -- the modern-day city of Nur-Sultan. It was Astana from 1997 - 2018. From 1992 - 1997, it was Akmola. From the 1960s to 1992, it was Tselinograd. From 1832 - 1960 it was called Akmolinsk and from 1830 - 1832 it was called Akmoly. I said the names of cities change a lot in the old Russian Empire, now didn't I? :-)<br/>Strix Nebulosa -- The Great Grey Owl.<br/>Talking Photograph -- ?? I see no reason you can't make talking photographs as well as talking paintings, as long as the photographer uses the same enchantment!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Points of Inflection</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>
    <span>Chapter Sixteen: Points of Inflection. </span>
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    <span>By the end of her experience on the beginner’s or bunny slope, Bellatrix had demonstrated a reasonable command of skiing. The experience of having to teach her had certainly given several of the instructors grey hair, and nearly gotten one turned into a rabbit. Conversely, there had been several times initially that her reckless daring had let her find ways to exceed even the limits of that very safe slope, and she had needed to show off her own skill with </span>
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    <em>Arresto Momentum </em>
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    <span>to keep from splitting her head open on a tree at a high rate of speed. </span>
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    <span>The people at the kiddie slope were happy that she wasn’t there, so that Delphini could fit in with the other children and parents would stop panicking. The teachers at the bunny slope were relieved when Bellatrix decided to hit some serious powder. Her raw will, when her madness leant her a manic focus, proved terrifying. For a fifty-one year old woman who had just started skiing, she was blowing through the slopes to the awe of some professionals. </span>
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    <span>Since the Nevis Range ski resort was far enough out that it was mostly only accessible by rail at this point, with the petrol rationing, the visitors were mostly staying a while. That meant as the days passed that most of the people became more comfortable with Bellatrix’s presence. Ironically Bellatrix found out that Dolohov had previously gone skiing there, which made her smirk. </span>
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    <span>He was always the least objectionable of her fellow Death Eaters. </span>
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    <span>The whole while she was supposedly enjoying herself, she was really rigidly projecting control over the situation to the outside world, and to herself. She wanted to act like this was normal, when she knew that it was anything but normal. </span>
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    <span>Really, letting herself be baited by the muggles, when it was really all in her head, to prove that she was better at their muggle sport of skiing, had been an act of pure distraction. She was just trying to forget what she was contemplating doing. </span>
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    <span>And yet, when the week was over, Bellatrix and Delphini were still on the train to Hogsmeade Station, now that there was a regular service. </span>
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    <span>Bellatrix had lived comfortably in denial while making her daughter happy. But each night they had returned to their luxurious suite, the finest in the lodge, and Bellatrix had put her daughter to bed. </span>
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    <span>With a strange and numbing kind of conviction, she had avoided thinking about it. She had avoided saying anything. Then she had carried on. </span>
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    <span>It was dreamlike and Bellatrix was not at all sure how she had carried through with the visit to Hogwarts until the moment snapped to life when Delphini matter-of-factly asked her: “What’s wrong, mum?”</span>
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    <span>The beautiful silver-blonde little lass who was </span>
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    <em>her’s. </em>
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    <span>Delphini Black. She probably got her blonde hair from the same place Narcissa did. </span>
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    <span>And the girl most assuredly knew that something was the matter.</span>
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    <span>Bellatrix had a rather frozen expression on her face as they walked from Hogsmeade toward Hogwarts. </span>
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    <span>She lightly squeezed her daughter’s hand. “I’m just trying to keep you safe,” was her answer, feeling a bit too automatic. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>What’s so dangerous, mum? We were having fun…” Delphini pouted.<br/>
</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>...Well, we were. Family is safe,” Bellatrix smiled, though she didn’t really feel it was true, but at least it was an easier lie than most. “That’s why mummy will protect you, deary. It was fun, and it was safe, but sometimes those muggles around you--that can not be safe.” </span></span><span><span>She kept her nose in a sneer to deter anyone passing by from questioning them, but in fact she just wanted to cuddle her daughter. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>So </span></span><span><em>you’re </em></span><span><span>going to keep me safe, mum?”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I’m a very good witch,” Bellatrix answered with a kind of grand impertinence. “Everyone runs away from mum because of how good of a witch she is. They don’t care to face her! And <em>especially </em>muggles.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Boasting aside, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Hogwarts looked intact, but they were differences. There had to be differences. They had changed everything with their triumph, after all. Glaringly obvious, on the road to Hogsmeade, was the statue of Voldemort. It was supposed to celebrate his triumph, and in fact, there was a large pile of galleons at the foot, of Slytherin students seeking luck in exams or their love life or whatever other stupid thing they were worried about. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>But Bellatrix remembered the debates, and she knew that the statue actually marked the place of death of Professor McGonagall. Her absolutely brilliant rearguard action had allowed so many of the student</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>s</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> and </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>others fighting against Voldemort to escape. What Voldemort, Bellatrix and the rest of the Death Eaters hadn’t had occur to them had been that while the Hogwarts Express normally ran only for the beginning and end of the term and the breaks, in fact, it was just an enchanted engine and rake, and could be brought up to steam and run whenever it was needed, and the crew did this under McGonagall’s instruction to evacuate the survivors of the lost battle from Hogsmeade Station while she held off Voldemort to allow them to escape. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Without that act, Bellatrix would not have had her encounter with the Mudblood, the Bloodtraitor, that damned Tonks, at Chernosvyat. She would have faced Koldovstoretsy only. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>They would not have told her that despite all of her efforts being perfect, she might fail her Lord anyway. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>There would be no doubt in her heart. For a single step, Bellatrix paused, and brought a gloved hand to her chest as she looked around the snow, the ice, the white-covered trees. She remembered what it had been like under the man who, in teenager impertinence, she had called ‘Dumble-fuck’ back in the sixties, and how much more she had gotten away with as an older teenager when he had been on his extended leave of absence. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Now, of course, the school was being run by Dolores Umbridge as the Headmistress, and Bellatrix, to be honest, thought she was worse than Dumble-fuck. For all her lust over blood purity and professed love of the Dark Lord, Bellatrix was trying to imagine something more boring than being trapped in a school run by Pink Dolores. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Ahead, there were only Slytherin banners on the school as she approached. Exactly as her Lord had promised, it was now the only House. Her house. Somehow, Umbridge’s house as well. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>Shouldn’t the dumb bitch be a Hufflepuff or something? </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix mused as they arrived at the castle. Unfortunately, she’d have to be social to get access to the library. And Umbridge would doubtless want to be very social indeed with Voldemort’s right-hand woman. She was an inveterate social climber and in that sense, she had earned being a Slytherin.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Mum, will I get to go someday?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Of course you will.” Bellatrix paused. She couldn’t really bring herself to lie to her daughter. “Well, you shall study magic somewhere grand and majestic and perfect,” she said, her eloquence getting the better of her. It was also crushing honesty about what was going on at the moment. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Maybe nothing would be the same again.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Madame Lestrange! Welcome to Hogwarts! It’s wonderful to see you again!” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Umbridge’s voice led to a twitch of a grimace on Bellatrix’s face that made her daughter giggle, before she looked up. “Why, Headmistress,” Bellatrix allowed with her own sickening sweetness. “It’s so wonderful indeed to return to Hogwarts. Meet my daughter—Delphini Black.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Delphini looked up with wide eyes and carefully waved a hand toward Dolores. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Oh, aren’t you an </span></span><span><em>absolutely adorable </em></span><span><span>wonderful little pureblood snugglekins!” Dolores rushed forward and bent down with this maliciously honeyed smile on her face and grabbed Delphini’s cheeks. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix froze in a way her daughter recognised as ominous, but Dolores clearly didn’t. Delphini started back at her with an ominous severity of her own, trying to imitate her mother. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Dolores managed to realise there was an issue, and rose to whisper to Bellatrix. “Is something a-matter?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Nothing is a-matter,” Bellatrix answered with a voice dripping with ominous intent. </span></span></p><p><span><span>Dolores paused. “Is it true, that she’s the </span></span><span><em>Dark Lord</em></span><span><span>’s</span></span> <span><span>child, </span></span><span><span>himself?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Yes,” Bellatrix said impulsively. “You know that is why she is a very serious girl, Umbridge.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Dolores’ eyes widened. “Ah, indeed. Come this way, please, please.” She turned and scuttered forward toward the gargoyles and up and on to the Headmaster’s Office. “Isn’t it so wonderful to see only Slytherin banners all about now? The dissolution of the houses was a marvelous day, it seems so wonderfully long ago, like Hogwarts has always been an all-Slytherin, no-Mudblood school! And the students are so well-behaved! Exactly as I always suspected, it was the mudbloods leading the others astray, and now we are one big, happy family!” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix could instantly tell from just a casual look at the students in their Slytherin robes that they </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>utterly hated </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Dolores. She also knew, already, from Dolohov, that Dolores had been put in charge of Hogwarts precisely because she hated children, and so the Dark Lord had seen fit to force her to be around children, including the powerful pureblood Slytherin children of people who very much did not like the way that Umbridge ran Hogwarts. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>In fact, Dolores wanted to do anything but the actual job she had been given, and thought she could be better at many jobs, such as leading the Wizengamot at denouncing and ordering the executions of enemies of the Dark Lord. She had never gotten the opportunity. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix sympathised with the students. She was </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>Toujours Pur, </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>but life was also meant to be lived. The noxious Umbridge was making life hell for all the kids who </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>just wanted to have fun. </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>And to be honest, Bellatrix would sooner fuck a mudblood than spend a single day in Umbridge’s Hogwarts. She was absolutely confident that if Umbridge had been in charge when she was a student, she would have made sure the bitch ate the killing curse somewhere deniable. At least Dumblefuck </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>acknowledged the concept of ‘fun’. He was just bad at it. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>They arrived in Umbridge’s office. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>It was carpeted floor to ceiling in sickening pink and her cat was there, or another one, or some former member of Dumbledore’s Army forcibly transfigurated into a Persian Cat, Bellatrix wasn’t sure and didn’t really care, though Delphini found an excuse to play with the kitty, that seemed to be happy to be away from Umbridge for a moment. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Dolores of course insisted on getting out her tea set and serving Bellatrix Proper Tea Service complete with cucumber sandwiches. If Bellatrix had not been so intent on her objective, she might well have broken out a Cruciatus curse then and there. There was nothing wrong with Tea; but there was plenty wrong with sharing it with Dolores Umbridge. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>So what are you here for, Madame Lestrange?” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <em>Black, </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix mentally corrected. Maybe she should just go ahead and formally change her name back. If there was anything left of her husband, some starving muggle had baked it into his family’s goulash in central Europe already. The thought brought a twisted grin to her lips. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Dolores had been off and rambling even before her question had been answered, about how wonderfully was preparing the new generation of Wizards to serve the Dark Lord. “</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Madame Lestrange? Madame Lestrange?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix jerked up. “I want access to the library. In particular, I want everything you have on the history of magic in the Transcaucasus.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>...Trans… ...caucasus? Is that like some muggle perversion?” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>Bellatrix almost choked in awe at her ignorance, especially when the Army was in active combat there. <em>How</em><em> does she even remember how to breathe? I’d rather sit here and watch Dumblefuck diddle a boy or something. </em></span>
  <span>
    <span>“No. It’s the region of the world containing Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Oh, how lovely! I do recall us having a few volumes. You know, that ghastly Irma Pince is the only professor who survived and kept her position, and I am afraid I can’t do very much against her, but I shall give you access, of course. Anything to remind her of her place.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <em>Beautiful. </em>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Can I watch your daughter while you perform the research?” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <em>I wouldn’t let you watch a fly, let alone the most important thing in the world to me. </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix managed not to voice the words. She also paused for a moment. Wasn’t Voldemort the most important thing in the world to her? But Delphini was </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>part </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>of Voldemort, his living creation, her daughter…</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <em>She’ll be fine. Voldemort’s child. Dolores isn’t that much of a syphilitic moron. </em>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Since she will attend the school soon, I will take her on a tour! Doubtless, as the Heir of Slytherin, she will be the Head Girl someday…!” Umbridge continued to squawk. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Don’t tell anyone. I want her to be able to establish herself when she comes, students attending now will still be here when she’s a firstie,” Bellatrix answered smoothly, and rose. “But yes, you may.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I am honoured to care for the Heir of Slytherin…!”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Don’t go, mum,” Delphini looked up pleading. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>It won’t be long, and we’ll get some pastries in Hogsmeade this evening, I promise,” Bellatrix smiled confidently until Delphini’s expression brightened. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Oh, you shouldn’t spoil her, she is the Dark Lord’s heir…!” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>...But she does deserve her chocolate just like any girl,” Bellatrix said with a particularly malicious smile that Umbridge completely missed the point of. “And I will reward her, just as I serve the Dark Lord. Take good care of her.” With a lazy wave, she took the slip that Umbridge had written out, and used it to head into the library. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Irma Pince had become sullen and withdrawn since the Battle of Hogwarts, having sided against Voldemort, but not definitely enough to lose her head, unlike the other Professors. Now she maintained the libraries in the methodical and grim execution of a duty which she had managed to be sullen and withdrawn about for decades. Whereas she might have confronted a student, she just offered a nod of acknowledgement when Bellatrix arrived at the restricted stacks. “Lestrange.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Thank you, Madame Pince,” Bellatrix acknowledged, and breezed past her. She was the last ring of a fading bell, the last memory of a Hogwarts before the Dark Lord. Bellatrix had no time for her. </span></span><span><span>Though, for that matter, she was sure that Pince would make a better Headmistress than Umbridge. </span></span><span><em>Hmm. </em></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Referencing her way through the stacks—she knew the sorting system well, she had </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>earned </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>the title of ‘Brightest Witch of Her Age’--she managed to find the section she was looking for </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>after some time which passed quickly for her, but was certainly hours of distraction. Unsurprisingly</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>, with its grandiose titles, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>it harked to another age in the Wizarding world, when there was peace, and exploring of the whole world, under the great peace of the Statute of Secrecy, was available to everyone</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>Ararat &amp; Damawand: Magical Forces in the Mythology of Tigranid Armenia and the Achaemenid Empire. </em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then, her heart skipped a beat. As she found the spot in the old tome, it made it absolutely clear that Tonks, the Naryshkina woman and the mudblood had been absolutely right. The Golden Apple Tree just transmuted the power of the Water of Life. It had no intrinsic properties of its own. There was no immortality to be in the power of the </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>Rabdos </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>of Koschei the Deathless. You just needed to know the right place to look for the information, and it wasn’t in Russian history, but in Persian history, and you had to put the two together: Connect Anahit to Anahita, connect Ararat to Koschei. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Without their warnings she could have never done it. Voldemort certainly hadn’t. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>It left many questions, the how and the why, and how it would be possible to gain the immortality, or at least the youth, that she herself sought. But she could see them all starting to come together now. And as they came together, the bottom also dropped out from her stomach into something like a bottomless, infinite pit. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She desperately wanted anything other than to be here, confronted with this choice. Oh, there was an easy step to make: Take the book to Voldemort and tell him the truth, all of it. Explain to him how he needed to seize Ararat. Offer to lead the Army there herself. Her crack troops could smash through Georgia and take it, she was sure. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix put the book away and quietly left the Hogwarts stacks. She had only been there about two hours. It had been enough time, and her stomach roiled with discomfort at ancient memories of her time as a student. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She returned to the Headmaster’s office with everything uncertain. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Oh, Madame Lestrange! Welcome back – did you find what you wanted, so soon?” Umbridge looked delighted.</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Delphini sat in front of the children’s tea set with an absolutely composed but miserable expression </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>and her hair thoroughly mussed up</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>. Even now she didn’t dare move or turn to stare at her mother and for a moment Bellatrix wondered if that dumb pink bitch had ensorcelled her daughter. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I did,” Bellatrix answered, and reached down to gently brush her daughter’s shoulder as her muscles began to tense threateningly. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Delphini, though, leapt up and gave her a hug. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix smiled. “I’ll be going now,” she added.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Oh, it’s such a shame! You could stay for High Tea?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I’m afraid not. But I will remember to mention you to Our Lord, the next chance we get.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><em>Thank you, </em></span><span><span>Madame Lestrange. </span></span><span><em>Thank you. </em></span><span><span>You know I am the most loyal.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <em>If you are, Our Lord is fucked. </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>“Of course, Miss Umbridge. Have a good day.” She started to turn.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I must say, your daughter is quiet, Madame Lestrange. You should get her a cat! And she would really look better in some pink, than those poor grey and black robes…” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I think Delphini gets to dress the way she wants to dress,” Bellatrix answered, and held her daughter’s hand closer.</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Why, I never..!” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>But then they left Umbridge behind, and soon enough, Hogwarts as well, heading back toward the Black Lake. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I was scared you weren’t done,” Delphini confided. “So I stayed very still so she wouldn’t be mean to me when you left me again.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Ohh, deary,” Bellatrix sighed and pulled her daughter into a hug again. “She didn’t do anything bad, did she?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>She kept trying to braid my hair, and..”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I’m going to kill that dumb bitch,” Bellatrix snarled.</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Mum, you’re not supposed to talk that way!”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>You’re right, but sometimes I do it anyway,” Bellatrix grinned, as if she were sharing a secret, and sharing a secret, they indeed were. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Her daughter hugged her leg harder. “It’s alright, mum. It wasn’t </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>thaat </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>bad. But promise me you’ll never leave again?” Little eyes as wide as saucers nonetheless looked up. “I don’t like being away from you and I don’t want to go back to the Augurey or worse to someone with all that pink like Umbridge. Please, mum?”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>When it hit, it was the simple request of her daughter. When it hit, it was the ringing of a hammer against crystal. Looking down into Black Lake, named long ago, supposedly after a distant ancestor, she felt her memories from school parade back to her. She calculated the risks of Voldemort to her… Her heart ached at the prospect of being away from her daughter. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>No, if anyone was going to live forever it was going to be her and her wonderful child. It was a silent thundercrack in the mind. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I promise, deary. We’ll never be apart again,” she said, and picked her up to hug her and hold her close. “But you have to promise me that you will do exactly as I say, and stay close and obey me, in the next week, no matter how uncomfortable it is. If you do, deary, we’ll have an adventure together. Do. You. Understand?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I’m Ready, Mum!” Delphini answered with defiant insistence. Her eyes shown with confidence, too. “We’ll have our adventure.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Trembling and yet hugging her daughter close, confidently, despite it, Bellatrix began to lay out the rest of her plan in her head. She would have to move fast and far. It would be inadequate to simply run away. It would be inadequate to simply give up. To secure her daughter and herself, she needed to be decisive, she needed to be grand, she needed to be dramatic. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Caught in a trance, she could barely focus on what was around her, other than the warmth of her little daughter’s hug. And yet, despite that, in a fragmented psyche, she calculated, she began to put the pieces together. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>It was by love and not ambition that she, without even really realising it until it was already done, had crossed the Rubicon. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The Swordsmen were in Power, but she, also, was a Swordswoman now. It was time to use cold steel for what mattered, for though the hour was late, she still had a chance. She hugged her daughter closer. </span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>References:<br/>1. Umbridge is noted as hating children, but she also enthusiastically went into her "work" at Hogwarts.<br/>2. Pince was supposedly on the side of the DA, but was never seen fighting at the Battle of Hogwarts.<br/>3. The Rubicon, a river in Italy, of course signifies an absolutely irrevocable decision.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Spectacular Insanity</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>That there was nothing more dangerous than the way that Bellatrix had been now unmoored was beyond doubt. There was only one constant in her life: Her daughter. Even Delphini, though, knew that all was not well from the trembling manic energy in her mother.</p><p>They ate some sweets together in Hogsmeade and then went to a Wizarding shop. There, Bellatrix was looking for something in particular and she had her mind very fixed on it as well. It was a self-dispensing capsule, an enchanted artefact that would allow for a potion in it to be dispensed slowly over a long period of time.</p><p>Having found and selected one, with a brilliant grin on her lips, she rounded up her daughter from the pa rt of the store with hair-potions and the y headed out of the village together in the fading light, passing the train line, and not going to the station, but instead into the woods. “Mum, where are we going?”</p><p>“Berwick-upon-Tweed,” Bellatrix answered idly. “With a detour along the way.”</p><p>“I don’t want to go back…!”</p><p>“Don’t worry, you’re <em> not. going. back.” </em> She stopped and looked firmly at her daughter. “I just need to do something first.”</p><p>“But the woods…? Not the train?” Delphini looked up wide-eyed, a little scared of where they were heading.</p><p>“Not the train.” Bellatrix paused, and grinned. “We’re going to make sure you’re nice and safe, deary. And we’re going to travel in style, like Witches, not Muggles, while mum takes care of some business that will help make everything better.” She selected one tree that seemed particularly suitable, and drew her wand. “We’re going to travel like Russians: We’ll use a whole tree for a broom!”</p><p>With her daughter’s eyes wide, she began the incantations which gave the power of levitation to the tree, until it was pulled forth from the ground, and enchanted as Bellatrix had learned in her long sojourn as an enemy in the Slavic lands. Nonetheless, she had been observant of the local custom. Now there was the opportunity to use it. There was something rawer that she appreciated, the talent and flare of her own magic creating this transport instead of buying a carefully manufactured broom in a shop. A broom wouldn’t do for transporting her daughter, or executing her plan. The tree would.</p><p>“ <em> This is gonna be so much fun!” </em> Delphini, clearly, absolutely could not wait for the ride. “ <em> Awesome, mum! </em> ”</p><p>As it now floated of its own accord in front of them, Bellatrix hoisted her daughter up with a twisted grin of delight and accomplishment, and then, grabbing branches, followed her aboard. A moment later, to make sure her daughter stayed safe, she carefully cast <em> Incarcerous </em> in a variation that let her guide ropes to link her daughter and herself and then around their bags and the tree trunk as well, to provide essentially a flying harness for them. Delphini giggled at the ropes, Bellatrix managing to be gentle enough to only tickle her daughter a little bit.</p><p>“ <em> Hang on, </em> ” Bellatrix called, and using her wand to steer, brought the tree up into the air at low altitude, and then faster and faster. The branches in front of them bent back in the wind, but also blocked most of it from the position on the trunk where Bellatrix and Delphini sat, and thus gave them the cover to go faster than they would fully exposed on a broom. They flew faster and faster, with Bellatrix calling forth her power to urge them on, until she was forcing the tree into the wind at close to a hundred and eighty miles an hour, and she was hunched down close over her daughter, a warm and reassuring presence above little Delphini.</p><p>She whipped through the night to the southeast, her eyes enchanted to see in the dark to avoid the tops of the mountains of the Grampians as she hugged the ground. Now she felt like a witch again, powerful and able to do whatever she wanted. Now she felt <em> good </em> that she was sharing that experience with her daughter, instead of the way so much of her life had been controlled.</p><p>Still, by the end of an hour’s flight to the southeast, the pleasure and excitement were starting to wear off for Delphini. She was tired, and it was hard to stay firmly on the tree as they flew at high speed with the wind buffeting them. Bellatrix hugged her close. “Not much longer, deary. Not much longer.”</p><p>Their final destination was Morpeth, which was chosen randomly for being a northern suburb of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Newcastle was certainly large enough to have, somewhere, exactly what she would need to make this work. Circling in the suburbs in the region—the city was bustling because British Coal was back, big time, to support the War Effort—she found what looked like a comfortably large Muggle middle class house with several cars in front, and swung in the darkness to settle down in their backyard.</p><p>The tree hovering obediently a few feet off the ground, Bellatrix unbound herself and her daughter and gave her a hug, taking out a magically hot thermos of hot cocoa acquired in Hogsmeade and a pastry. “Stay here, and whatever you do, don’t leave the tree, but you can shelter under the branches,” Bellatrix instructed firmly, “and maybe take a nap if you like.”</p><p>“ You said you wouldn’t leave…”</p><p>Bellatrix gave her daughter a hug. “And I won’t. My magic keeps the tree hovering, and so you shall know that I am well, so I will not be far.” It was a lie, but an honest one in its way, and there was a part of Bellatrix that was uncomfortable with her daughter seeing what happened here, and certainly any stray memories of her might be disastrous.</p><p>She headed to the door, just as a young brown-haired woman in her early thirties or something like that came to it, wondering at the commotion outside. Her face widened into shock, and then a rictus of fear. Muggles in all of England had learned well that Wizarding folk could do to them what they pleased in the service of the Dark Lord. There was no law here, except, of course, the law of the sword. In Scotland, the situation was somewhat more regular, because between the nuclear attack on Edinburgh and the need for troops for the Dark Lord’s armies, the Scots had been conciliated, providing free troops at yet another step above the sentiments of the Janissaries; Berwick and the Debated Lands had been handed back to Scotland, and Holyrood had a measure of latitude and discretion in its affairs that had been entirely eliminated in England proper. There, she had not thought to try and do what she was about to do. So she had flown further south than would otherwise be necessary, and would do her work in England.</p><p>The woman tried to close the door again. Bellatrix caught it with her foot and drove it back out, her dagger out and close, rushing forward to the woman’s neck. “Would you interfere with the work of a servant of the Dark Lord?” She asked as the blade pressed to the woman’s neck, her voice dropping to a hissed whisper. “ <em> Are you such a fool? </em> ”</p><p>The muggle woman froze. “No. Forgive me,” she whispered in wet, agonised fear. “Forgive me for all of this. Forgive me… James!” She screamed, and the knife pressed into her neck by instinct.</p><p>Her husband, coming downstairs, froze in place.</p><p>For a moment, it was Potter and the one Weasel boy standing in front of her. It was Mudblood in her hands and at the touch of her dagger. The memory flashed through Bellatrix’s mind, and then she roughly shoved the woman away and drew her wand, instead. In full view of her husband, she forcibly transformed the woman into a polecat. The electric lighting flickered and almost went out, and the television smoked.</p><p>Bellatrix grinned and winked. “James, is it? As you may have noticed, I just made your wife a polecat; unfortunately, she won’t be a professional stripper for you afterwards,” she added with a wicked bemusement creeping into her voice as she invoked the use of the name as a euphemism for a stripper. “But I’m sure she will think you are <em> so heroic </em> when you come back to the house having obeyed me like a <em> very good boy, </em> and I turn her back into a human. How’s about that?” To the man’s credit, he hadn’t pissed himself yet.</p><p>“Wha… What do you want from me?” He finally asked over his trembling fear, his eyes fixed on his wife, who was now cowering against the couch in the corner.</p><p>“ Do you know anyone in the neighbourhood who has a five year old?”</p><p>“Ye-yes, the Rigbys… Thomas, my colleague at…” His face fell, his voice trailed off as if he had betrayed someone, and Bellatrix granted, that was true.</p><p>“That will do. Come with me, James.” She gestured with her wand. “ Let’s go take care of some business together.”</p><p>“With a <em> child </em> ?”</p><p>“Oh yes,” Bellatrix answered, nudging him toward the door. Ultimately, James went along with her toward the Ford Fiesta that he still had a permit to drive under the very tight fuel rationing scheme.</p><p>“Is this your ghastly… Little… Muggle box on wheels?” Bellatrix asked, looking it over with an expression of surprised disgust. “I thought they were … Bigger.”</p><p>“...Not many people can even drive cars right now,” the man answered with a sullen hint of defiance.</p><p>Bellatrix shot him a look, and then looked back at the tiny little muggle wheeled box. “It’s just… Smaller… than all the other muggle boxes. And the fabric is… Fake, not leather.” The expression on her face was very much one that reflected Bellatrix’s feeling of if she should have really come up with a plan that involved getting into a tiny muggle <em> car </em> without enough room to really wave her wand if it came to a fight, that looked like it would explode if someone looked at it funny.</p><p><em> It’s too late to turn back. </em> A few seconds later, they were driving down the suburban streets, James in a cold sweat, while Bellatrix had discovered that there was a little flip-down board with plastic on it that had a mirror on it, and was making faces to it in an attempt to idly distract herself from what she was doing. That seemed to terrify the muggle even more, which was useful in principle since it kept him driving toward the house of this Rigby family.</p><p>He pulled up, and Bellatrix, for a brief moment that genuinely scared her, found herself trapped in the automobile. Unlike all the other times she had been in one, there wasn’t someone there to open the door for her. For a moment, Bellatrix thought her entire plan might be undone by her inability to open the door of a Ford Fiesta, and she silently cursed the absurdity of Muggle inventions. Finally she fumbled with the handle and got out without having to ask for help. “Alright, come with me.”</p><p>She forced him along up to the door, and made him call for them with the electric doorbell. Another man, with darker hair, opened the door, and began to smile, if in confusion, at his friend. Then he saw Bellatrix and paled.</p><p>“I have to have a talk with you and your wife, Mister… Rigby,” Bellatrix said coolly, pushing them into the house by her threatening force of presence, and levelling her wand when James started to open his mouth. He closed it immediately.</p><p>“I’ll get Sarah…”</p><p>“No, call for her,” Bellatrix said with an absolutely stone cold expression. “And your child.”</p><p>“But… What do you want with Amy, she’s just five and…”</p><p>“BOTH OF THEM!” Bellatrix screamed.</p><p>“I’m an Englishman. No,” Mister Rigby answered with a growing sense of defiance.</p><p>“All right then,” Bellatrix answered, and raised her wand, whiplike fast as the man lunged toward her and James shouted “No, don’t be a fool!”</p><p>“ <em> Imperio </em> !”</p><p>The commotion, ironically, brought the rest of the Riggby family downstairs, but by that point, James had watched in horror as Bellatrix had completed working the curse completely over onto James. Soon curses and hexes were flying quickly for other things, oo, with the muggle with the Ford Fiesta as a hapless spectactor. Sarah Rigby had at least the small mercy of not really understanding what was happening before her daughter was ensorcelled to come close to Bellatrix and her own mind and that of her husband were systematically wiped and expunged of any memory of her daughter’s mere existence. There was nothing quite so horrifying as two mothers set against each other for the sake of their children, but Sarah had no means to resist and no way to imperil Bellatrix’s plan, and so it was solved in a strictly one-sided fashion.</p><p>By the time it was done, Amy Rigby followed in quiet obedience to Bellatrix and stuffed herself into the back of the Ford Fiesta as Bellatrix settled into the passenger’s seat, and she was now for all intents and purposes an orphan, for while her family was alive, they no longer knew that she existed. They no longer knew that they had a daughter who an hour before they had loved.</p><p>And the muggle next to her sat in silent horror, driving his car back to his house, that he had participated in that to save his wife. Finally, he dared to ask: “What kind of assurance do I have that you’ll keep your end of the deal?”</p><p>“None,” Bellatrix flashed a far-too-wide smile at him. “But don’t worry. I mean, what kind of husband wouldn’t at least try for his wife? A piss-poor one that’s for sure. So, you did your best.”</p><p>With a flash of a smile as the car rolled up back to his house, Bellatrix got out with her prize, and forced him back in. Now she began to work, taking her potions kit out of her bag of holding. With a thoroughly ensorcelled girl and a polyjuice potion…</p><p>The potion, of course, took forever to brew, and shrugged and turned to James. “Make food for us,” she instructed, and headed out to get Delphini, who had fallen asleep under the branches of the tree. A moment later, she disguised the floating tree by the simple device of having it stand upright, so it looked like part of a grove already on the back lot of the property, and then wandered back in.</p><p>The man of the house had not interfered. Of course he was absolutely terrified, but he was also aware that he would have no truck with law enforcement when it came to the actions of a Witch, because the Wizards now were in power, and that was that.</p><p>While the potion was brewing, Bellatrix ensorcelled him to go to sleep, and with a breakfast of baked beans, bread, tomatoes and butter, they passed the time passably well, and then Bellatrix napped herself after forcing James to sleep as well, leaving the plates out for his wife to lick as a courtesy.</p><p>After an eternity, and more dubious rationed muggle food, but the somewhat better tea as well, the polyjuice potion was ready, and Bellatrix applied it to Amy Rigby with a strong instruction that she should imitate everything she saw from Delphini over the next few hours. With instant obedience, the girl began to mimic the curious and fascinated Delphini. The rest of the potion went into the enchanted capsule, and Bellatrix forced the girl who now looked exactly like her daughter to swallow it.</p><p>Then she turned to James, and smiled. It was not a kind smile, though the outcome was milder than it might have been. Bellatrix needed no investigations and no complications. “Thank you for your hospitality. I did lie to you in one way. You won’t be able to tell your wife that you were a hero. I’m going to make both of you forget that all of this ever happened.”</p><p>And with that, she raised her wand. It was time for the next phase of the plan.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>As promised, Hermione had taken some of her leave to use the floo network to reach Moskva from Nizhniy Novgorod. The Russian capital had also survived, and still bustled, though the war had left countless abandoned construction projects, the trams and the buses were the main mode of transport, and as the years had worn on since they first arrived, the city had gotten grimier and more broken down. Less money, less effort to maintain it for people, and more money and more effort to be ploughed into war preparations.</p><p>She arrived in the Ministry Building, which was near the Krutitskoe Podvorye and was of a similar age, but had long been hidden by powerful magic. It still was, and that was for reasons of security. A series of tunnels led out of it, to disperse the Wizards and Witches who were coming and going into different parts of the city, and after spending a good fifteen minutes walking through one of those magically lit tunnels, she finally was able to leave it, to come to a Metro station, and make her way to meet Draco.</p><p>The Café they met at had returned to the Soviet form of the past, out of the necessity of rationing. She saw Draco standing out from the crowd, because Draco was Draco, and he was immediately recognisable, unmistakable. He was dressed in the uniform of a regular line infantry officer with the rank of Major, and he didn’t seem to recognise her for a moment, before jerking with surprise as she approached, and coming to attention.</p><p>“None of that, Draco, we’re meeting for dinner,” Hermione laughed, and smiled. “You look well.”</p><p>“For what it’s worth, Councillor,” he agreed.</p><p>“Hermione,” she said, easily, and all of the tension and worry melted away when she remembered his patient disposition during the flight from England to Russia, the escape across a war-torn Europe, and the way he had changed then. He had not lost the virtues that those changes had brought to him.</p><p>“Hermione,” Draco acknowledged with a smile, and they were shown to a table.</p><p>The <em> buterbrody </em> type open sandwiches with sprats or beetroot and herrings were a reminder of the humbler times that they found themselves in than the Moskva which had, until the hour of the war, been straining to return to more ornate times. But the tea was still excellent for all the rationing imposed some restrictions on how elaborate the food was, and in the midst of the boisterous conversation, they would not be overheard.</p><p>They could have spoke English to make that assured, but there was something about both of them in that moment that very much craved normalcy, which included no nervous or questioning looks from those around them in the wartime environment. So, by an unspoken mutual agreement, they spoke Russian.</p><p>Because of that, they could have just been two more officers meeting after duty, if they had a posting in one of the headquarters elements in the capital, or some element of Moskva’s defences. It was a comfortable obscurity.</p><p>“I understand you’ll complete your command staff training, and then be on the short-list for Councillor yourself,” Hermione smiled. “Even Tonks … Dora, is willing to …”</p><p>“Tell people about my medals? Well, I suppose if it makes her feel better,” Draco answered after a moment, stirring some preserves into his tea and taking a drink. “Otherwise, I’d rather anyone not bring them up. The difference between a hero and dead is that you held on for a second longer.”</p><p>“I’d drink to that,” Hermione acknowledged. “Why does she prefer Dora instead of Tonks now? Do you know? She asked me a year ago, so Ginny and I obliged, especially when we were around her a lot this winter, but she never explained.”</p><p>“Remus,” Draco answered with a flush of shame colouring his cheeks. “She just doesn’t want to be reminded of the days when she was happy, and married, and in love, and going to raise her son together with him. I confess that I can’t say I blame her.”</p><p>“ I suppose that’s as good of a reason as...Well, it’s not really good, but you know.”</p><p>“Yes, I rather do.” Draco bit into his food. “Has it been hard on the Caucasus front?”</p><p>“We had to use a tactical nuke to keep the enemy off the Poti-Alat railway line and the pipeline,” Hermione answered. “So it was rough going, but we drove them back and reoccupied good defensive ground afterwards.”</p><p>“Something to be said for that. We used tactical nukes at Alvesta and Varnamo too, and we broke through to the coast and finally reached Gothenburg, but then we had to use more to reduce the pocket in Scania. But the Baltic Fleet was able to support the landings in Zealand without them, when we took Copenhagen and established our defensive perimeter on the Great Belt. I don’t like the nuclear weapons, I feel like we’re slowly destroying more and more of the world.”</p><p>“ You’ll get no argument about that from me,” Hermione shook her head. “The sooner we can win, the better. Was that the last action you saw, then, the Zealand operation?”</p><p>“Yeah, we’re stalemated northwest of Trollhattan. We’ve occupied Trondheim on the Norwegian coast, you know, but the bulk of the Norwegian population and central-western Sweden are still under the control of forces loyal to the Dark Lord, and still fighting us. It’s nothing to feel good about, not yet. ”</p><p>“ But you did hold on for that one second longer,” a shake of her head, holding up her glass of tea. Still, from the moment that Draco reacted, she could tell that it did not fill his heart with joy.</p><p>“I’m a coward, Hermione, and I honestly don’t know how I did it. To be honest, I think I only manage to fight because I’m more afraid of the humiliation of everyone knowing I’m a coward than I am of dying, at this point. I don’t know how you or Ginny do it.”</p><p>“Maybe we’re actually not that different, after all, actually,” Hermione counted with a flicker of gentle bright brown eyes danced. “Maybe I’m actually just as afraid as you are, Draco, and I’m just here, trying to keep hope alive in the future, not because I’m a hero, but because I expect to die soon, and I’m less afraid of death than I am of people remembering me only for the Battle of Hogwarts.”</p><p>Draco cringed. “I’d sooner die.”</p><p>“You made the right call at the right time, Draco,” Hermione answered. “It wasn’t your fault it didn’t work out. You certainly have saved lives from that day forward. That’s something to be proud of, and clearly your superiors think so as well, because they’ve decided you have the discretion, as well as the valour, for high command.”</p><p>“I’d say you were just flattering me, except that I have to accept that they clearly do.” He paused, and took a breath. “Hermione, I’ve wronged you, I spent years wronging you, and…”</p><p>“Knock it off,” the young witch laughed. “We’re front comrades now, we’re both fighting for the same Army. I’ve killed more men than I can count, I’ve boiled tea on the exhaust of a tank, and when I’ve won a battle, I’ve crossed my legs on a friend’s cot and drank Vodka with one fist and smoked belomors with the other to celebrate the triumph . We’re both in the same Army, right?” She smiled at the nod. “We’re both fighting the same enemy, right?” At the second nod, she grinned. “Exactly right. You see, it’s over. I’m an adult now, and I get to call it over and done with.”</p><p>“One thing hasn’t changed, Hermione,” he remarked in wondering bemusement. “You are as much of a confident know-it-all as you were in your first year. Do you still read?”</p><p>“ Every manual at arms, and book of strategy and politics, and official campaign history that I can get my hands on,” Hermione admitted. “You got me in one.”</p><p>“You’re part of the military now,” Draco smiled, “but you’ve just become a military bookworm, that’s all.”</p><p>“Guilty as charged.” She spent a little time catching up on her food and drink after the fairly intense conversation, before she asked the question that was hot on her tongue. “Draco, what’s Bellatrix like?”</p><p>Draco’s expression froze. For a solid minute, he said nothing, and he barely moved, just blinking a few times like he had been pinned in place. “Bellatrix Black, you mean.”</p><p>“Well, Lestrange, but…”</p><p>“She hates her married name, actually. She taught me Occlumency, you know. Called me her favourite nephew. Of course, I’m her only nephew.” He grinned mirthlessly. “Her mind was racing a mile-a-minute with sarcastic one-liners. I think she was impatient, because she wanted the future she had fought for to come right now, right then, right there, to make up for the fourteen years she spent in Azkaban. She comes off as a loyal footsoldier, but honestly, in private, to me, she was all rebellious. I think she served the Dark Lord to get away from her family and expectations of married Pureblood life for a Lady of House Black.” He shrugged. “I’m not sure what else to say.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Hermione paused for just a moment. “I have one more question.”</p><p>“Go ahead.”</p><p>“If she knew in advance that Voldemort was going to kill her, would she let it happen?”</p><p>Draco’s eyes widened. “Oh Merlin no. I don’t have the faintest idea what would happen, but it would be spectacular insanity.”</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. The Ford Fiesta was the most popular car in Britain in the 1990s.<br/>2. I just assume that, somewhere in the world of magic, someone has invented a delayed release capsule for putting potions into.<br/>3. Draco's heroism may not be stereotypical, but it is powerful, and in-line with his character to me.<br/>4. Krutitskoe Podvorye is a large old religious complex along the Moskva (Moscow) River, which was the central administrative complex of the Russian Orthodox Church during the 17th century. The Ministry building is located immediately to the north and uses magic to fold into a little pocket of reality between the Krutitskoe Podvorye complex and the intersection of the Krasnokholmskaya embankment and Sarinsky Proezd.<br/>5. A "polecat" is, in addition to being a kind of animal, a slang term for a stripper/exotic dancer (i.e., dancing around a pole).</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0018"><h2>18. Concorde</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Eighteen: Concorde</p><p> </p><p>For four days, Bellatrix had camped in the woods with her daughter and her ‘daughter’, systematically using the Imperious curse to drive her daughter’s behaviour further and further into the girl she had stolen for this task. She had apparated to a Tesco she had seen on the flight back into the woods, and rather awkwardly shopped for enough to make this viable, but after fourteen years in Azkaban, even sleeping rough in the woods was in comparison pleasant, and Delphini thought it an adventure as she grew used to the idea of her otherwise unnerving shadow. Enchanting blankets and making fires never die kept them warm in the snow even if their clothes were all unsuited for it.</p><p>Then, on the final day, she had flown to Berwick-upon-Tweed and deposited her fake daughter with Euphemia Rowle. This had led to a brief confrontation, as Euphemia remembered enough to know that something was wrong thanks to her House Elves, but Bellatrix had gotten the drop on her, expecting trouble, and dealt with the situation quickly, then wiped her memory more thoroughly. For at least as long as the Polyjuice potion would hold out from the magical slow-release capsule, the cover would last. She had then used the Rowle Manor to send the message to prepare a Concorde for her return to the front in the Caucasus.</p><p>Then they flew south. Knowing what was going to happen, Bellatrix grew steadily clingier, holding Delphini as close as she could on the great Tree until they had reach the outskirts of London. it seemed impossible now that her daughter would ever be a Slytherin as all the women in her family had been. But there was one thing she could do, and she was going to have to do it anyway.</p><p>She landed the Tree in the Colne Valley Regional Park, and taking their bags, hand in hand, mother and daughter, they made their way to the edge of the woods leaving the tree behind. Perhaps another lucky Wizard could find it, but there was no time for a hand-off, and it would just raise suspicions anyway. So they paused at the edge of the greenery, now carpeted with the white of snow, both of them panting a big from the exertion of walking through it. The Uxbridge Tube station was just in front of them.</p><p>“So, I want you to hold still and think good thoughts, Delphi,” Bellatrix explained. “Put your bag down.”</p><p>“Mum…?” Delphini asked as she set the bag down and looked up. “What’s going to happen?”</p><p>“You’re going to be a Slytherin for a day, dear, as befits you as the Heir of Slytherin.” She waved her wand, and without hesitating more or making it harder for her to get it over with, she cast Transfigurate, and as she completed the spell, she had transformed her own daughter into a snake. To keep her warm in the cold, she reached down to the instantly trembling snake and brought her up to her breast, whispering in the Parseltongue that Voldemort had taught her. “<em>Come, little one, deary wrap around my neck and be warm…” </em></p><p>After a moment, Delphini obeyed her mother’s instruction, rasping, nervously, “<em>Mum, I don’t understand… </em> ”</p><p>“<em>I can’t let anyone know you’re coming with me… Good girl, a little looser.. Yes, like that,</em>” Bellatrix noted when she was satisfied with the twists of tail around her pale skin. Adjusting her collar, she added in a rasping whisper of hisses, “let me know if it gets stuffy,” and carried on to the Tube station carrying both suitcases now. She was already feeling triumphant, for while she regretted transforming her daughter into a snake, it had revealed that unlike a normal transfiguration, it had given her the knowledge of Parseltongue—that confirmed that Delphini was indeed a heir of Slytherin.</p><p>They rode the tube in, and then back out to Heathrow, in a state of distanced reverie. She remembered the songs she used to listen to her in her rebellious days on the wizarding radio, when she changed to the muggle stations and away from the approved wizarding ones… The songs that had led her to explore the Tube system in London a few times, to a world of crisp black leather jackets and amazing music and smoke-filled drinking sessions in muggle bars.</p><p>Her cousin Sir i us had adopted that world wholeheartedly. Bellatrix had never abandoned her own values or beliefs. Never would, she expected. A part of her desperately clung to that, in an hour when everything was uncertain, when mentally, she was already unmoored from the whole rest of the world, from the values which had driven her for thirty years, her entire adult life. Loyalty to Voldemort.</p><p>It was gone now, and that was not something you could regain. Once it was gone, it was most assuredly gone forever, and if you regretted it, then he would be happy to take your life when you returned. She had already drifted past the point of return without really thinking about it. The tube ride to Heathrow was agonising, as she occasionally reached up to stroke her daughter, curled around her neck as a snake.</p><p>But of course, she was shown through security without a check. They opened the gates for her, and took her to the special private terminal for Wizards on official business. With the Morsmordre prominently displayed on the tail, the Speedbird, as the Concordes were still called by their pilots, had her Rolls-Royce Olympus turbofans lazily turning over as de-icing was finished. The Stewardesses took her luggage (and her daughter’s by extension) and settled it for her, and she retreated at once to the private cabin at the back with a single bed (Concorde was quite narrow).</p><p>Of course, she couldn’t let anyone on the aeroplane know about her daughter, but she could at least let Delphi slither around the bed as they reached cruising altitude. Bellatrix leaned into the curved fuselage and called for a glass of wine than she drank slowly, like she were not really aware of what she was doing.</p><p>So far, so good. They had escaped the ground in Britain, and reached altitude, and were flying supersonic over the North Sea and Europe. Her tension surged again during the Technical Stop in Lvov, still thousands of kilometres from her troops. She wondered what her sisters would think of her now, and with a surging realisation understood that if she wanted, she could actually talk to Andy again. The knowledge brought a twisted expression of anger to her face. <em> Damn you, Andy, it might have been different..! </em></p><p>No, she wasn’t going to be a blood traitor. But there was <em> Cissy, </em> and that <em> did </em> mean something, seeing Cissy again. But then another thought pounded into her head. <em> Oathbreaker. </em> She had honestly, and willingly, sworn to receive the Dark Mark. She had voluntarily made herself into Voldemort’s servant. By right, she was a traitor in heart and soul now. She was about to be a traitor in deed. She called for another glass of wine as they left Lvov, and then another, but Concorde was too fast for her to be thoroughly drunk when she arrived, and there was a part of her that rejected it, that resisted it. This was too important.</p><p><em> Suffer the wretch not to live, </em> still she thought. The Koldovstoretsy had every right to regard her with suspicion and contempt. Knowing their customs, she idly wondered if they might kill her rather than accept her.</p><p>But she did have a plan to deal with that, now didn’t she? That’s why that capsule was meant to last hopefully weeks. That’s why she’d invested so much time in preparing that muggle girl to be her daughter. Still, this positive outcome relied upon trusting others, and that was why Bellatrix’s stomach was curled into knots for the rest of the flight, bundling up in tension until she was too sick for more wine. With the heat cranked all the way up for her daughter to be comfortable as a snake, the misery was particularly acute, and finally she left the cabin to sit in one of the conference rooms forward. The comparative cold helped a bit, but in the end she just returned to the private cabin and remained there with her daughter until they landed about thirty minutes later in Grozny.</p><p>She had to be helped down to the car that took her to the train, and there she drifted to sleep for a while, mercifully, with her daughter still coiled close. Slowly, the train pulled out through the ruins of Grozny, and then accelerated—Bellatrix was already asleep.</p><p>She woke up from the fitful sleep, though, in time to see the train gliding to a stop through the snow and the damaged buildings in the southern part of Vladikavkaz. A convoy of Land Rovers was waiting for them. Bellatrix began to relax, because these were <em> her </em> troops, and still nothing had stopped them. That meant that, among other things, the moment that they were securely in the Land Rover Defender she was riding in, her wand was out, and where there had been a snake, there was against her daughter.</p><p>Delphini wordlessly hugged her as tightly as she could. Worried that there would be recorders, Bellatrix had not spoken in Parseltongue to her again until the train ride, when she felt too sick to say very much. “Mum…”</p><p>“Shh, it’s okay, I’m not transfigurating you again, deary.” Bellatrix let her daughter hold onto her as tightly as she wanted.</p><p>“You did come back when you promised,” Delphini answered. “That wasn’t as scary as I thought!”</p><p>Bellatrix couldn’t help but smile. “Well, good. You are the Heir of Slytherin, after all.” She adjusted her daughter’s clothes and buttoned up her jacket against the cold. The drive went on and on, up and over the Georgian Military Road. It had only been seventeen days since she had left her Army behind, but it truly felt like eternity when she arrived at the camp, having driven through an endless slurry of white on a road kept bare, a thin grey line into the mountains.</p><p>The eternity would really be in the minutes after she arrived. A few intact houses remained in the high mountain village, and with the Army settled into winter quarters, these had been appropriated for the headquarters of her forces and that meant that Jorge and Kempler were operating out of them. The sun was already going down for another day, but there was hot tea waiting for her, and a bedroom prepared. The orderlies waiting for her did not ask questions about the little girl with her.</p><p>She went down to see Jorge, stopping at the personal files room for a moment. “Bring up the Chief of Staff’s file,” Bellatrix instructed to one of the computer operators, and then leaned over the woman’s screen.</p><p>
  <em> Jorge Andrés Serrano Diaz. </em>
</p><p>For the first time, Bellatrix had bothered to look up the full name of the most important person in her Army, or at least with the intent of remembering it, anyway. With a nod, she went down to the situation room in the former Alpine skiing lodge. She paused for long enough to get a cup of tea, Bellatrix was sure she’d need it. Then she went forward.</p><p>“General Diaz, I would like to talk to you alone, please.”</p><p>Jorge Diaz looked up, and for a moment an intangible expression flickered across his middle-aged face. Then he nodded. “M’lady,” he affirmed, and came to her side, as Bellatrix led him back upstairs toward the room that had been prepared for her. She paused in front of it.</p><p>Now, sickness and tiredness fled, and Bellatrix paced with her tea back and forth down the hallway, feeling an intense giddiness, a nervous energy that was absolutely delightful. She desperately wanted to kill something, but in a way, she was about to. Just not Jorge, she didn’t want to kill Jorge. “General Diaz, I want you to meet someone.”</p><p>“M’lady…?”</p><p>Bellatrix stopped pacing, and opened the door. “Come out, Delphi!”</p><p>A silver-blonde haired girl peeked out from the room.</p><p>“I present to you my daughter Delphini Black, the natural daughter of Lord Voldemort and the Heir of Slytherin. By bringing her here, General Diaz, I have disobeyed the direct instructions of Lord Voldemort. You see, the <em> Rabdos </em> of Koschei will be useless to his plans. He will need to come here to find the Water of Life on Ararat himself. And he has grown more and more unstable over the years until we are all slaves unto the hour of death!” Her voice reached a screaming fever’s pitch at the last sentence, and Delphini shrank in fear and surprise. “He has rejected my daughter as his heir and denies that she is really his daughter in any meaningful way… But she is most certainly the Heir of Slytherin, and there is only one thread keeping him from death, and I know how it may be severed! ”</p><p>Delphini started crying. One might have difficulty in telling if Jorge was more shocked at the words coming from Bellatrix, or the fact that she said them directly in front of her daughter, but if this was a matter of treason, than the split would have to be total.</p><p>The pieces could be picked up later, couldn’t they?</p><p>“You’re going to defect,” Jorge said, his voice cool, after sighing heavily. “For what it is worth, you have always been better than the others, Madame Lestrange…”</p><p>“Black. Madame Black,” she corrected sharply.</p><p>“Madame Black. You understood that a good blade must be oiled and polished, I will give you that. That is more than most of the other Death Eaters, your comrades, ever appreciated. You have been personally kind and worked to preserve the lives of my men from needless death. Do you know that there will be men whose families are put to death because of this?”</p><p>Bellatrix fixed him with a strange look. She didn’t say anything at first. Jorge didn’t give her the chance.</p><p>“Their families will be put to death, and many will die in particularly horrible ways. Those men with families will be giving up the happiness that you just secured with your own daughter, or at least that you will if this plan works out, and the Russians don’t shoot you out of hand and send the rest of us to the camps.” His voice was iron, his countenance frozen in place, but his words were clipped and intense.</p><p>“So, we’ll find those men, and…”</p><p>“No.” Jorge came to regular attention like he would before a military officer, in another life that seemed so very long ago, hands at parade rest behind his back. “We will take care of our comrades, and they will fight with us because they are our comrades. We will follow you, Madame Black. We will become your ‘Wild Geese’. I was once a soldier of <em>La Legion </em>before your Death Eaters conquered and overthrew and destroyed my country and subjugated it to the Spanish Wizarding community. I thought I would have the opportunity for revenge by serving as a Janissary, but step by step, I led myself into being a whore, and further from any chance of resistance. I have lost my honour and I cannot regain it, but I believe you are powerful enough and clever enough to give me a fitting vengeance. The men will follow you, they know you are the best of your kind. They know, too, that Voldemort has grown more and more mad, and perhaps, they will believe, too, that your daughter by him will have the same power he does, and so by that he can someday be totally defeated. I believe that your words are not an idle lie or boast; you do know something about his power. And that’s enough. It’s enough for us to wreak bloody hell on them. And comrades will support comrades. You don’t need to do anything about it. You will not mistrust any of us, we are either all for you, or none of us are. Choose.”</p><p>Bellatrix opened her mouth… And leaned forward and threw up in the hallway, the metal cup dropping from her fingers to the ground with a splash of the remaining tea. She was overcome with the raw anxiety of the experience, the unmoored feeling of reckless daring, as she stretched out and defied Voldemort for the first time in her adult life. Holding her stomach until the dry heaves finished, she wiped her mouth of vomit and spittle, and looked up with a brilliant, dangerous and very mad grin. “Make the preparations, General Diaz. As you muggles probably understand the reference – It’s all for one, and one for all.”</p><p>General Jorge Diaz extended his hand.</p><p>Bellatrix took it.</p><p>As she released from the handshake, his hand shot up in a salute to his forehead. “<em>Viva la Muerte</em>!”</p><p>Bellatrix couldn’t help it. She smiled savagely at the words she recognised. <em>I will let make you regret abandoning Delphini</em>! She thought, and for the first time, she <em>raged </em>at Voldemort at the same time that she shivered with fear and anticipation and delight and raw giddiness. <em>It’s working, it’s working</em>!</p><p>Her daughter ran to her and squeezed her leg, crying.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione had returned to the Dadiani Manor, but for the moment, they had not been ordered to return to the front. Bellatrix’s forces were still quiet, and might be for months more. December had just begun, and perhaps they wouldn’t even resume offensive operations until April. There would be plenty of time to rest, if that was the case.</p><p>Or there wouldn’t be, and they’d need to be ready. There was still a little party of Hermione that, even though she could easily apparate the distance, felt guilty about being back here as a guest of the Dadiani Manor rather than waiting for any potential hostility out on the front.</p><p>The tea was good, the food was excellent. It was hard for her to claim she had any complaints about the Dadiani Manor, or its surroundings. The forest was open for her to explore as a guest, and it was magical, but much safer than the Forbidden Forest by Hogwarts, not like that was very hard. Hermione went snowshoeing to get her exercise in, as more snow fell and the ground was further covered. Now, thanks to the nuclear bombs, these lesser mountains in central Georgia might as well have been the peaks of the Caucasus, and the peaks themselves were eternally white. The chill had consumed the whole world.</p><p>That made the warmth on returning through the heavy wood gates and climbing up into the Dadiani Manor proper a welcome blessing. Inside, Larissa was waiting for her in the library, with tea, and a plate of Shashlik. “Welcome back, Hermione. I think Master Flyorov is trying to fatten me up so I fail my physical when I return to active duty,” her friend greeted her with a smile. “So I need to share some of the meat with you.”</p><p>“He just wants you to recover. That wound could have easily been mortal, Larissa,” Hermione answered as she moved to make her tea.</p><p>Larissa responded with a rather silly noise.</p><p>“...Have you turned into Dora?”</p><p>“Absolutely not! Though it would be impossible for you to tell if I had,” Larissa snarked. “I’m just bemused. You really were quite the bookworm once, weren’t you?”</p><p>Hermione paused and looked at her.</p><p>“I think it should be Lara, now,” a smile greeted her.</p><p>“Fair.” Hermione flushed a bit. “I kind of missed that one, didn’t I?”</p><p>“It’s one of those cultural things to pick up. Give it another three years or so and nobody will be able to tell you apart from someone who’s native-born.”</p><p>“Hnf.” Hermione scrunched her nose a bit. “I think you’re just given to extravagant flattery, Lara.”</p><p>“As a noblewoman I can afford the effort to make other people feel good about themselves.” She folded up the book on her lap, and adjusted the coverlet hanging over her, and said it so deadpan…</p><p>Hermione burst out laughing. Inside, she was so thankful at the colour returning to the woman’s cheeks, at the way the sunken and hollow expression of her eyes had faded. She would have felt a very sore loss, if she had lost Larissa as she had so many friends and comrades from Hogwarts. Now, they would both live to another battle. Maybe she could even be confident that they’d both live to see the spring.</p><p>A tramping signalled someone else’s arrival, and both of them whipped their heads around. Hermione went for her wand by instinct, but forced herself to relax afterwards. Such were the reflexes of a combat veteran. She suspected that under her coverlet, Larissa had done the same thing.</p><p>Fortunately, it was just Ginny coming back with a bright grin on her face. “Oh, it’s good to see you two. Welcome back, Hermione.”</p><p>“It’s good to see you too! Where have you been?” Hermione asked in return, pouring tea for Ginny.</p><p>“Oh, thank you,” she took the cup gleefully as she sat. “I’ve given in and started to practice Russian Quidditch. I enchanted a tree and I’ve been at it. Because it’s winter, and it’s so cold these days, the tree will last for quite some time, maybe into July before it has to be replaced by another one, so a single tree is good for the entire season.”</p><p>“I said we’d enculturate both of you in another three years,” Larissa grinned.</p><p>“Oh come off it, Lara, you only said that about me!”</p><p>“Oh, good, she finished the nickname lecture with you.” Ginny’s face glinted into a bemused, reddish grin from the heat coming back to her cheeks.</p><p>“Come off it, it’s not a lecture, though it was especially egregious with you,” Larissa protested, wagging her finger teasingly. “It took me getting Hermione drunk that one time in Nanchang to figure out what your full name actually <em> was. </em> Anyhow, come on, Ginny, have some of this food before I get fat.”</p><p>Ginny obligingly took a few strips of Shashlik, shaking her head. “I don’t know about what you all have planned, but I’m looking forward to actually playing in a Quidditch match again.”</p><p>“Just don’t end up in a whole body cast,” Hermione deadpanned, smiling, too.</p><p>“You’re supposed to be on my side,” Ginny shook her head ruefully.</p><p>For a moment, Hermione was simply relieved with Ginny’s brave and easygoing disposition. She had endured the loss of the boy she was in love with, beyond their failure, Harry had been her’s, she had been dreaming about a future with him, and expecting that future. And they had failed him, they all felt that.</p><p>But Ginny endured, and found ways to enjoy life. It made Hermione slightly embarrassed for her own ridiculous life. Breaking up with Ron, coming out… That last one caused a guilty pang, since she hadn’t actually told Ginny yet, and now, she really wanted to resolve to make sure that she knew before anything happened to them, that she wouldn’t leave unsaid with her best friend the fact that she had broken up with her brother for perfectly reasonable causes, instead of ones that made her feel guilty.</p><p>Even if they did make her feel a little guilty.</p><p>She was about to open her mouth and start talking about it when Master Flyorov came in.</p><p>“Ladies, we have just received an urgent communication through the Floo network from Kutaisi,” he said, his expression more serious than Hermione had ever seen before. “My wife wants you at the 27<sup>th </sup> Division’s headquarters, she’s apparating there herself, immediately. Madame Tonks is with her.”</p><p>Lady Tamar Dadiani herself. The Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft of the Republic of Georgia, who had been actively fighting on the front in Abkhazia to the point she hadn’t actually visited them yet. Hermione stiffened.</p><p>Ginny’s eyes goggled, and she shrugged wryly in acceptance. “Do you know what it is? Has Lestrange decided to try a winter offensive?”</p><p>Hermione reached up and grabbed her arm. No change. Still…</p><p>“Or Voldemort executed Lestrange, and there’s someone new and dumber in charge,” Larissa mused.</p><p>“No, it’s not that,” Flyorov and Hermione said in unison, and then looked at each, both surprised at the other.</p><p>“Go on, Vasily Gregorovich,” the young witch warmed her tea up, and drank it strong, knowing that she would soon not have the opportunity. She flashed a smile as Larissa imitated the gesture, then frowned. <em> Is she planning on going too? She must be planning on going too… </em></p><p>“Yes, well,” the old man stepped over to get his own cup. “I will put it to you all plainly, and not speculate. Bellatrix, identifying herself as Bellatrix <em> Black, </em> has asked for a meeting, specifically including all of you but also the senior commanders on the front, under a flag of truce.”</p><p>“It’s a trap!” Ginny exclaimed, her eyes flashing. “Lestrange was probably ordered to come after us by Voldemort when she reported back to him, and she’ll break a flag of truce to do it.” She paused, though, looking around and realising that the other people in the room didn’t share her immediate opinion.</p><p>“Eh, you know that we will declare ‘no quarter’ and refuse to take prisoners if they violate a flag of truce like that,” Larissa noted frankly. “Bellatrix may be a madwoman but she’s treated her Army decently and she has to know that would have a serious negative impact on morale.” She looked at Hermione, significantly.</p><p>Hermione was muttering something under her breath. “<em>Spectacular insanity…</em>” She looked up, sheepishly, at the others, realising that she had been heard. “Sorry. Something somebody told me about Bellatrix. Anyhow, let’s go. If State Councillor Dadiani wants to extend a truce, that’s her right. And if General Pronichev concurs, I’m confident it’s a good idea. Let’s go see what this is about.”</p><p>Larissa pushed herself up from her chair. “I’ll get my greatcoat and hat.”</p><p>“<em>Lara,</em>” Hermione groaned. “You are not well enough.”</p><p>“Is that an order? Lady Tamar said ‘all of us’.” Larissa looked back at her. “I want to be there, and I think that order applied to me, too. If you want, you can complain to her and get me sent back here from Divisional Headquarters, but I swear, I’m going at least that far.”</p><p>Hermione bolted down the rest of her tea in a slug of hot liquid strong enough to make her shake her head and shiver. “All right then. We’ll sort it out there. Let’s go!”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>References:<br/>1. Speedbird is the general callsign for all British Airways flights dating back to the BOAC years; thanks to “Unladen Swallow” for the correction.<br/>2. Though she does not have a special talent for it, I assume Bellatrix was able to learn Parseltongue from Voldemort.<br/>3. La Legion is the formation of the Spanish Foreign Legion--yes, they have one too.<br/>4. "Viva la Muerte" translates as "Long Live Death", the battle-cry of the Legion.<br/>5. I freely admit that my story, and the interest in has in the different names people use with each other, and the way these can change in circumstance (and also because of preference and memory, in the case of Nymphadora Tonks) is of interest to me, but probably also one of the culturally hardest things for an English-language reader to follow. Feel free to ask clarifying questions or suggest how I might improve it if any of you feel a lack of clarity on the matter of names.<br/>6. The Wild Geese were Irish refugees from the English conquest, who fought for the monarchies of Spain and France extensively in the 17th and 18th centuries. It has also referred to several more modern military mercenary units; it carries a connotation of exile.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0019"><h2>19. Treason Doth Not Prosper...</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter 19: Treason Doth Not Prosper…</p><p> </p><p>The group apparated together to the headquarters of the 27<sup>th </sup> Guards Division. Tents, armoured vehicles, Kamaz trucks, occupied houses in a village—this was life for the commander of the division and his staff and the guards, the quartermasters, and everyone else who formed the backbone of the Division as a living thing.</p><p>At last, they met Tamar Dadiani. She was drinking tea with General Pronichev. The old woman was nonetheless tall and fit, not at all stooped with age, with a round, pleasant face and long grey hair, that wanted to be frizzy but had been forced into a braid. She was also dressed in a regular Army uniform, so she couldn’t be immediately identified as a Witch. Her dark eyes were sharp, and sly, and held the humour that she had surely held since youth. Their calm and confident presence was what immediately marked her as a leader. She had kept the peace among Georgian Wizards in the midst of three civil wars in her little country, as the old Soviet order was swept away in a particularly chaotic way in Georgia. Now she led them in a war for survival.</p><p>“Lady Tamar, General Pronichev,” Hermione saluted as she approached.</p><p>“Hermione Granger?” Tamar turned toward her, over the map she had been reviewing with Pronichev.</p><p>“Yes, Lady Tamar.”</p><p>“Good, you’re just in time. We’re reviewing the location that… Madame Black requested. It’s right on the border with the Ossetian territory, so we’re working out the boundaries and positions for operational forces to make sure that we have the proper support.”</p><p>“Are we going to agree?” Hermione asked, stepping forward to the map, at Tamar’s left side, which in military protocol was the proper place for a subordinate.</p><p>“I see some value in it,” Lady Tamar acknowledged.</p><p>“Talking is useful until it isn’t, and we’re not in an active combat phase,” General Pronichev agreed.</p><p>“We don’t think the location is a trap?” She asked, studying the position, on a ridge in the mountains to the northwest.</p><p>“No, it’s more a matter of personal convenience from their headquarters, but certainly it’s within range of both to apparate. I think it’s that they have good intelligence files on the Ossetian frontier, so it’s what her protection forces are comfortable with,” Pronichev mused. “Do we commit?” He was asking Lady Tamar, as the ranking Witch.</p><p>“Yes, we commit.”</p><p>Dora arrived a moment later, a cup in hand. The expression on her face was unreadable as she approached Hermione, the young woman stepping away as the two General-rank officers returned to the comms section to contact Bellatrix’s Army with their reply.</p><p>“You alright?” Dora asked as she stepped close to Hermione, speaking in only a whisper.</p><p>“Of course I am,” she answered with a bit of defiance, brown eyes meeting her compatriot’s. As was the case with anything fluffy and odd, Tonks pulled off a ushanka much better than Hermione thought she did.</p><p>Dora leaned closer. “I know what Bellatrix did to you. I remember the exchange at Chernosvyat. Are. You. All. Right?”</p><p>“Yes.” Hermione didn’t even blink.</p><p>“Fair. You know this may not end in an…”</p><p>“Shh, I respect it, Dora, I do, but the only outcome I actually want tomorrow is all of my friends being alive, and a reverse against Voldemort. I don’t know what’s happening but I have my suspicions.”</p><p>“So do I. They’re probably the same.” Dora broke up the moment by forming her face into a pig snout for a moment. “ So, we’ll deal with it together, right?”</p><p>“All in it together,” Hermione nodded. “Let’s see what she has to say, and if it’s a fight, it’s a fight, if it’s not… I go back to the <em> banya </em> at the Dadiani Manor and get a nice dinner. All things said, I’m not going to start complaining about it.”</p><p>“Then we’ll see,” Dora agreed.</p><p>Lady Tamar and General Pronichev returned from the comms section. “We’ve reached an agreement,” Lady Tamar explained. “We will apparate to the final destination immediately. I’ll mark the grid coordinates for all of you on the map. Six on our side, six on their side. She knows we’re all Wizards except for Colonel Kabanov, so we will have an advantage; even so, she says she’s bringing five regular soldiers, and herself, nothing more. We’ve got the advantage in wizarding firepower, so we’ll duel our way out if it is a trap. If she's lied, we'll respond immediately and vigorously.”</p><p>Hermione opened her mouth to protest that she herself didn’t know who Colonel Kabanov was, until she saw the man approach. There was a certain glint in his eyes like lightning, and he was dressed in the regular field uniform of an infantry officer, but Hermione suspected this was not the case. <em> They are taking this seriously. </em></p><p>Confirming Hermione’s suspicion, Dora nodded to the Colonel and he returned the gesture, like they were acquainted to each other.</p><p>“Alright. Come closer, please,” Lady Tamar instructed. They reached out, hand to hand, and it was the Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft of Georgia who personally apparated the entire group up onto a ridge along the border between Ossetia and Georgia. There was an abandoned watch-post of the peacekeeping forces here, and that was the spot that had been agreed upon for the meeting. It was also exposed to the wind, and cold, brutally cold.</p><p>Hermione cursed. In the moment of them all being surprised, and debating what to do, she had forgotten to get Lady Tamar to force Larissa to stay behind, and now, from the shiver that ran through her body even under her massive greatcoat, it was clear that the Russian Witch, who was still recovering from her wounds, would be punished cruelly by the cold, bitter wind on the ridge.</p><p>“Let me see if there’s some fuel for a heater or a fire in the guard hut , Ma’am,” Hermione asked to Tamar.</p><p>The older woman nodded her assent. “Of course, Councillor. We don’t know how long this will take.”</p><p>Hermione stepped across the scrabble of rocks on the slope and into the guard hut. There, she found a kerosene heater that still had some fuel, and quickly got it going. To her delight, she also found a tin pot that had been abandoned, and some tea in the stores. Brushing away some of the snow and grabbing some that was fresh from below the eaves to melt in the kettle , she stepped back out just in time to see Bellatrix apparate in with a group of soldiers.</p><p>Bellatrix, and someone else, a small child thoroughly bundled up against the cold, who clung close to her side. Ginny audibly gasped close-by.</p><p><em> What the hell? Did she really think she needed to bring a hostage while under flag of truce? </em> Hermione started. Then she narrowed her eyes and took in Bellatrix, who looked like a desperate cornered animal, her hair flapping violently in the wind on the ridge; she had a greatcoat of her own, but no hat. It was like a flag strung out behind her, tattered but proud. For all that, there seemed to be agony wrought on her face. She didn’t have her wand out.</p><p>Stuffed into that massive coat, Bellatrix looked like the smallest and loneliest person in the world, an imagine broken only by the tiny child at her side.</p><p>“Bellatrix Black?” Tamar Dadiani’s voice cut over the sound of the wind, in accented but precise English, as she watched Bellatrix’s men, in full winter gear, fan out cautiously. It was strange for Hermione to hear that name, instead of Bellatrix Lestrange, but that insistence on the part of Bellatrix matched with what Draco had told her, as well.</p><p>“Tamar Dadiani?” Bellatrix answered, and even now, in these strange circumstances, that voice brought back to Hermione a punishing set of memories. “I am indeed Bellatrix Black.” She gestured to the guard hut, with an imperious look set on her face and a crisp motion of a gloved hand. “May we go inside?”</p><p>The group followed, and Hermione stood by the door. For a moment, Bellatrix paused, as if she were trying to muster herself up some dignity, as she looked sharply at the woman whose armed she had scoured all those years before. She seemed like she wanted to say something, but then she let the wind reign, and she carried on inside. The building was at least large enough to be comfortable for all of them, and there were some murmurs of surprise and relief at the presence of the heater and the kettle now boiling over it.</p><p>Lady Tamar leaned against one wall with a casual confidence, watching and observing as Bellatrix carefully got the child to sit at her side in one of the remaining chairs. “She’s your daughter, isn’t she?”</p><p>“Yes,” Bellatrix acknowledged, looking, for a moment, surprised that Lady Tamar could tell, even though it seemed obvious. Then she looked up and focused. “I want an alliance,” she said simply, and the words made Hermione’s heart bottom out.</p><p><em> What…? </em> The younger witch just stood and stared at Bellatrix from by the heater in a moment of pure, unadulterated confusion.</p><p>“You want an Alliance?” Nymphadora stepped forward. “Do you realise how <em> ridiculous </em> that sounds?”</p><p>“I’m in control of my divisions, Tonks,” Bellatrix’s eyes flashed to her niece.</p><p>“<em>Don’t call me that. </em> ” Nymphadora stiffened, clearly reminded of the pain she could never forget, pain that had stripped the happiness from her disposition. Remus.</p><p>Lady Tamar raised a hand. “Please, <em> Councillor Tonks, </em> let her speak. I am <em> very interested </em> in hearing this. Madame Black, what interest do you think we have in an Alliance?”</p><p>“From Rostov to Astrakhan, from Volgograd south to the heights of the Caucasus and beyond them—I control all of the Janissary troops in the southern half of this sector and most of the other troops as well. If we drive back across the Jvari Pass and counterattack to the north… I can collapse the entire position of the Morsmordre in the southern front, and liberate an area of Russian and allied soil more than half the size of France. You’ve only managed one offensive, the Scandinavia operation, in this entire war. Other than that, the Morsmordre has always been on the march, always advancing. Well, I can make it two, I can save the oil fields and reopen direct land lines of communication, liberate major recruiting grounds for your armies!” She sank back, and looked around at them. “They’re with me. They’ll follow me.”</p><p>“Merlin, I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Ginny said with a stunned expression on her face. She didn’t even resort to accusing Bellatrix of planning a trap. It was all too stunning.</p><p>“I just need my daughter to be safe, you understand,” Bellatrix continued. “I could not risk Voldemort turning on her.”</p><p>Larissa had quietly stepped up to Hermione’s side, and poured out some of the tea into the aluminium cup she carried with her. She brought it over to Bellatrix, and said, almost tenderly, to Bellatrix: “You know that I am a member of the Princely Naryshkin family, and thought you have snapped at me in the midst of the duel, I will say as a graduate of the Black Court of Koldovstoretz, that if you do this, I will raise your daughter in my family as one of our own, she will go to Koldovstoretz, she will hold a princely rank. What you have done is very brave.”</p><p>“If Lady Larissa had not already made the offer, I would have extended it for the Dadiani,” Tamar agreed.</p><p>“You are seeming to suggest that I won’t be there to raise her,” Bellatrix answered, her voice going flat. “I very much intend to be. That is exactly why I am here.”</p><p>The group glanced at each other, and silenced reigned in answer. Ginny stepped over to Bellatrix’s side. “Can I take … Delphini, into another room? So you can all talk freely?”</p><p>Bellatrix hesitated, glaring at Ginny. “Alright, Weasel,” she allowed, unable to resist the mocking name.</p><p>Ginny gritted her teeth, but looped an arm around Delphini. “Come on, I’ve got… A chocolate bar from my ration pack, and I’ll show you some hexes, little witchling.” They slipped out, and the room, despite the tea and the heater, seemed to grow colder still.</p><p>Bellatrix looked down at her gloves, and back up.</p><p>“We could just go aside right now,” Larissa said, dimly, leaning against one of the walls by the stove. “An Unforgivable, or a gun, your preference, we could oblige it. A cigarette, a shot of vodka. Your choice on the blindfold.”</p><p>Bellatrix’s eyes narrowed and her face twisted up in rage, but she controlled herself, somehow. “I came here to hand you an inestimable gift. I do have my command staff ready to follow me, and we are ready to…”</p><p>“Turn your coat, against Voldemort,” Hermione finally forced herself to speak, clearing her mind, looking at the others around her. She had a cup of tea from the kettle in hand, now, and as she drank it, like a bolt of lightning, her memory focused on something she had read some weeks before. “She wants to change sides, well, we’ve let it happen before. Romania.”</p><p>Colonel Kabanov turned to look with interest at Hermione. Lady Tamar’s eyes narrowed. “Go on, Councillor.”</p><p>“Michael’s Coup. When Romania changed sides, the outcome of the war against Hitler was not yet decided. It opened the entire southern flank and allowed the success of the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive to turn into an absolutely devastating strategic blow to the Nazi Empire,” Hermione explained. “He was even awarded the Order of Victory for it, and unlike the Tsar, he was allowed to leave Romania safely when it became a communist country, carrying all of his possessions he could fit into a train. We have done it before, Ma’am, Sir.”</p><p>“She’s hurt you the <em> most, </em> ” Tonks said almost incredulously. “I… I admit I don’t know the example, either.”</p><p>“It’s a true story, Councillor Tonks,” Colonel Kabanov spoke for the first time. “That much, she’s absolutely spot on.”</p><p>It was like nobody really knew what to do. The entire event was far too strange. But Hermione remembered the book she had been reading when they were sailing across the Caspian to begin this strange campaign. Machiavelli’s advice in the situation would be succinct: Don’t obsess with revenge, make a deal, maximise the leverage against Voldemort. “What’s the way we can do maximum hurt to the Dark Lord?” Hermione asked. “Go on, <em> Madame Black, </em> let’s hear it. Let’s plan this out. If you want to be our ally, let’s figure out the maximum hurt we can do. They’re still talking about shooting you, after all. Looks like you’re going to have to try better than that.”</p><p>Eyes both angry and stricken looked back at her, and ignoring her, turned to Tamar.</p><p>“You heard the Councillor,” Lady Tamar’s gaze was steel, and she had remained standing the entire time. “ What else can you do for our cause, when you have already done so much against it?”</p><p>“There are two thousand Wizards under my overall operational direction in the Caucasus front – At least some will follow me, the rest will be denied to the enemy. There is no way you can turn the forces under my command without magic. Without me,” Bellatrix looked increasingly frantic, her eyes flicking from side to side. She clutched at the tea cup Larissa had given her.</p><p>“Those are all territories you and your fellow Death Eaters took from us in the past eighteen months,” Tamar noted. “Try again. Try harder. What else can we use?”</p><p>Bellatrix seemed to be gripping the cup so hard that it would have cracked if it were not metal. “James Dodson is the muggle Chief of Staff for the 14<sup>th </sup> Army besieging Sevastobol. He served under me in my previous command before I took this one, before General Diaz. Like General Diaz, we got along well. And Benjamarious Terrant is the commander of the Wizard contingent on the Crimean, he’s been under surveillance for potential subversive activities. It’s only a matter of time until he’s removed from command. Between the two of them, I could turn the Fourteenth Army after we have silently put everything in place for my troops here to turn north, for the Army of the Caucasus to begin its operation. But we would only have <em> days </em> to put it together, before He finds out. And I couldn’t travel there myself, so I don’t know how to make the connections without revealing my treachery. I am supposed to be here, not there. ”</p><p>Lady Tamar glanced to Hermione. “Does she mean the Dark Mark?”</p><p>“I’m not sure, Karkaroff was able to…”</p><p>“It’s gotten worse,” Bellatrix snarled. “It’s a permanent link, and as his power and strength have grown, he has made it more able to track us than it was before. We are all his slaves!” She leapt to her feet. “Don’t you understand? None of it was supposed to be like this! It was never supposed to be like this! He cares nothing for us, and the only reward I will get for loyalty is death!”</p><p>It was at that moment, presented with a problem more within the area of competence of the Black Court, that Larissa’s expression changed. “Actually, we might be able to turn that link against the Dark Lord, if it tells him where you are based on the Dark Mark, Madame Black.”</p><p>“How long do we have until your actions are found out?” Lady Tamar began to pace, but her eyes barely left Bellatrix.</p><p>“Days. Perhaps a week.”</p><p>The Georgian woman shot a look to Larissa next. “The plan you’re thinking of, is it viable in that timeframe? Otherwise, don’t waste our time with it.”</p><p>“It is, I’ll just have to call my friend Aiman, and arrange transport for her. Perhaps one of the enchanted Tu-144’s. The sooner she gets here the better.”</p><p>“What… Are you planning?” Bellatrix had lost the plot. She had thought she was going to be offering terms in triumph to a desperate enemy; instead, she was being compelled to stretch what had already pushed her to the ragged edge.</p><p>“Oh, that’s easy. Black Court, you know. Esoterica. Blood magic.” Larissa, pale and weak but looking even more dangerous for it in the moment, stepped forward toward Bellatrix with an ominous click of her boots. “You will go to Fourteenth Army headquarters, and the Dark Mark will remain behind. Alive.”</p><p>The two women started at each other sharply, nose to nose, Larissa leaning down. “It’s a small enough sacrifice if you really mean to be our ‘ally’, and be around to send your daughter to school after the war.”</p><p>“I’ll hear your plan out,” Bellatrix allowed, as if the combination of the lure of survival and the lure of magic could revive her moods, and focus her mind. “If you understand that it isn’t good enough, whatever sorcery you have planned. I need an excuse to travel to Fourteenth Army headquarters <em> officially, </em> even if the Dark Lord is not immediately alerted. Though, with a sufficiently high-ranking ‘prisoner’, I think I could craft the excuse.”</p><p>Hermione watched as Bellatrix focused on her, and her heart skipped a beat. Her extremities went numb, colder than they already were. And she met the gaze, as bravely as she could. Here she was, Bellatrix in the flesh, sitting down and having a talk with them. Her arm ached from what she was increasingly sure was the power of the curse. But there was little bravery inside of her as she watched Nymphadora rise out of her chair, and almost lunge at Bellatrix.</p><p>“A <em> Prisoner. </em> I know what you’re up to now, isn’t it? That Voldemort would forgive anything from you if you could hand one of the Golden Trio over to him, so he can finish the job he started at Hogwarts!?” There was the hysterical edge in her voice of a woman who had lost everything, and knew that this creature who was her aunt had caused a great deal of that pain.</p><p>Larissa held up a gloved hand and stepped forward, intervening. “We must all be practical here. We are at war. Personal emotions should be beyond us. The way I see it is that Madame Black is offering us something, and we need to consider the calculated risk.”</p><p>Hermione gritted her teeth and sucked in her breath. “If some on the side of the enemy desert to come to your service, if they be loyal, they will always make you a great acquisition; for the forces of the adversary diminish more with the loss of those who flee, than with those who are killed, even though the name of the fugitives is suspect to the new friends, and odious to the old.”</p><p>Larissa grinned and pointed at her friend with a snap of a black-gloved finger. “You go right on quoting Machiavelli.”</p><p>“I mean it when I said that she’s hurt me the most, but I still support doing whatever is necessary to win,” Hermione said as she took a step to her friend’s side. “What’s got you, Dora?”</p><p>“She means <em> you, </em> Hermione,” Dora answered, flustered.</p><p>Hermione felt like her insides had been hollowed out. “Yeah, I know. But I want to hear what Larissa’s planning first.”</p><p>Larissa tipped a salute to Hermione, a jaunty sort of gesture, and moved to circle Bellatrix. “It’s simple. I’m a bit of a layabout as a Witch of the Black Court. Aiman Sadykova, on the other hand, has cultivated blood magic finely.”</p><p>“<em>Have out with it, Naryshkina</em>!” Bellatrix snarled, her patience gone.</p><p>“We’ll cut your left arm off at the shoulder and keep it alive separate from your body, so Voldemort can’t track you through the Dark Mark. Removing the mark is impossible through normal means, it requires great sacrifice to be cleansed, but if we separate your arm and nourish it from a bowl of blood, Voldemort will think you are still at the front with your Army. You will be able to travel to the Crimean and try to make a second army defect then. And if you go through with it, I think that’s enough proof that you’re not doing this only to get ahold of Hermione Granger.” Larissa stood in an effortlessly graceful pose and struck up a cigarette with defiant insouciance. “What do you think, Hermione? Would that make you comfortable enough to go with her?”</p><p>There was a heavy sense of discomfort that Nymphadora and Hermione both felt hearing what Larissa had just described. This wasn’t the Dark Arts in the classic European sense, but something else, still dark. A Shaman of one of the tribes of the Steppe was a different tradition, but it still felt—Dark, in the fullest sense.</p><p>“There will be an enchanted replacement, of course, though we don’t have enough time to fit it,” Larissa continued easily, as if she were discussing tea rather than proposing the voluntary dismemberment of the woman in front of her. Even Lady Tamar was as stiff as a board. She may have gone to a school where these things were taught, but in her heart, she did not fully approve of them.</p><p>Bellatrix was staring at her left arm. Hermione couldn’t help but wonder: <em> Do you only now realise the totality of what you have done? Of how there’s truly no going back? </em> Yes, there was a little bit of sympathy in that thought, even though Hermione wanted to curse herself for it.</p><p>Then Bellatrix looked up, looked to her. “Well, Mudblood? If your friend and her blood-sorceress cut my arm off, will you go?”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes widened. “You’ll still do it?”</p><p>“I think it was McGonagall who liked to quote some muggle: ‘When you find yourself in Hell, keep going.’ Well, I’m in Hell, and I’m not going to stop.” She looked around the room, now focusing on Lady Tamar and Colonel Kabanov. “But I’m going to get that pardon. Magically sealed. Applicable to the whole of the CIS. And we’re going to find Lake Anahit.”</p><p>“Why is … Why? Why do <em> you </em> want it?” Lady Tamar answered, her eyes narrowing. “We expect that Voldemort will want to find the path, badly. But why you?”</p><p>“If I may be impertinent, My Lady,” Larissa interjected, “Fourteen years in the camps, as they’d say in the bad old days.”</p><p><a id="firstHeading2" name="firstHeading2"></a> Bellatrix pooled lower in her chair, and nodded with a shiver running through from head to toe. “Fourteen years! <em> Fourteen years! </em> And look at what we’ve got for it! The world overturned in war: Cities burn, Wizard kills wizard, brother fights brother, all across the world. There will be no end. He doesn’t <em> care </em> about an end. He <em> wants </em> it this way. He has us at each other’s throats lest we are ever a threat to him. He invents new ways to control us further through the Dark Mark. We huff fucking clouds of radiation, and not even that brought us anything except for more war. Oh, I wanted to rule at his side, oh yes. Oh yes, I wanted to get rid of all the dirty mudbloods, I surely did! You won’t see me became some blood traitor overnight. But he has become the doom of us all.” Listless, she held up her left arm, and stared longingly at it, even concealed by glove and en gageante. Her eyes flicked to Lady Tamar, abruptly composed, intense. “A pardon and an hour by the shore of Lake Anahit. I don’t need immortality. I just need my life back. Give me that, and I won’t just collapse the southern front for you; I’ll put your Army back on the Dnepr.”</p><p>There was a confidence in her eyes, a certainty which made that boast seem like a strong swig of samogon, of liquid courage. Hermione shivered. Bellatrix made acts of defiance, confidence and violence come with seductive tones. Somehow, she forged ahead into the madness, forgetting how to be afraid. She was in too deep to turn back, and she didn't flinch.</p><p>Colonel Kabanov stepped forward, and tipped his head, with a slightly mocking and slightly sincere politeness. “We cannot make those promises at this level, Madame Black. We will have to consult the government.”</p><p>“Go ahead and ask your chief muggle, then, but bear in mind that time is of the essence so get an answer quickly,” Bellatrix shrugged. “Unless you want to fail. Who are you, anyway?”</p><p>Colonel Kabanov smiled darkly, albeit with a touch of real humour reaching his eyes. “A muggle.”</p><p>“Well, Mister Muggle, bear in mind that I will need Wizards in position to secure those who will commit treason against me. We must act fast, we have a day to get your answer, or less.”</p><p>“ It’s kind of ironic that you’re calling that treason.” Nymphadora was shaking her head, and laughing almost hysterically, before she looked at Hermione with eyes that were serious despite the laughter. “...Are you really okay with this?”</p><p>“Treason doth not prosper because if it prospers, none dare call it treason,” Hermione quoted, and smiled, and nodded. “I said I’d do it, and I will.”</p><p>“Good, because I want one more thing.” Bellatrix's eyes drilled straight in to Hermione's now, and she felt herself caught like a deer. “From you, since you will be going with me into danger, from you, muddy, I want an Unbreakable Vow.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0020"><h2>20. A Strategic Turn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Twenty: A Strategic Turn</p><p> </p><p>The room was quiet. “How about you have made enough demands and set enough conditions,” Lady Tamar replied stiffly. “Will you keep trying to change the terms of the deal?”</p><p>“No, that’s all,” Bellatrix waved her hand, nervously airy. “ I merely need the assurance that someone is willing to keep me free, at their own personal cost, and do what I require of them, to meet the terms of this agreement.”</p><p>Tamar looked to Hermione. “Miss Granger,” she said, still speaking in English, “I cannot, and will not, expect you to bind yourself to that monster.”</p><p>Bellatrix’s face twisted into a sneer at what she was called.</p><p>Hermione’s pinched, clearly anguished face couldn’t hide the emotions she felt. But she looked to Bellatrix, and thought. <em> Can I really call myself a decent person if I don’t try everything that I can? </em> “If Stavka decides to support this, I need to obey. This isn’t any different than being asked to sacrifice yourself in war. It even has much better odds.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked to her, as if she were modestly surprised that Hermione had really consented, and so readily, too. She slowly pushed herself back to her feet. “Then I will see you tomorrow, muddy. I would like my daughter back now, and to depart. I will unilaterally keep the cease-fire in force along the front… The sooner you get word back to me, the better.”</p><p>“We understand.” Lady Tamar got up, her voice reserved coldness.</p><p>“Weasel, I’d like my daughter back!” Bellatrix shouted through the door to the other room.</p><p>Ginny emerged a moment later with Delphini, a <em> look </em> on her face, angry at the nickname, but also a little pale. Still, she smiled again for Delphini and gave her a hug. “You’re going back with your mother now,” Ginny added, and Delphini even waved goodbye to her before running over to Bellatrix, the woman picking her up, hugging her, and then setting her down to button up her coat.</p><p>With that, Bellatrix stepped out with her daughter to retrieve her men. The door slammed closed, and there was an aching silence in the old guard hut. Hermione idly wandered over to turn off the kerosene heater, as if it mattered. The snap of the switch was almost lost against the rush of the wind against the structure.</p><p>“Did we really just have this conversation with Bellatrix?” Nymphadora asked, shaking her head.</p><p>“We can talk back at the 27 <sup> th </sup> Division’s headquarters,” Lady Tamar noted tersely. “There’s no need to remain in range of the enemy for anything.”</p><p>Ginny still looked like a ghost, but Hermione obeyed Lady Tamar and didn’t say anything. She waited for them to link hands, and apparate back out, from straight inside of the Guard hut, so that they stood in front of the building now housing the divisional headquarters, and went inside at once.</p><p>There was tea and food waiting, and Hermione didn’t realise how hungry she was until she thought back on the brutal feeling of the wind cutting through her up on the ridge. In comparison to the interior of the divisional headquarters she also felt how little the kerosene heater had actually done. One of the Army cooks—since they were in winter quarters, they were trying to supply proper food—pressed a bowl of mushroom Solyanka to her and a slice of canned bread with a pat of butter on it. It might as well have been heaven. There was a staff meeting room, and they all clustered there with food. General Pronichev joined them, and guards were posted to keep anyone from listening in.</p><p>Pronichev listened to the summary patiently, not asking questions until Lady Tamar finished. When he was satisfied with the explanations, he turned to Hermione, who had finished eating her stew by that point, and reached out and gently took her hand. “Councillor, you are one of my officers,” he said, though his expression was more like that of a grandfather than anything else. “You may well have signed up to die on the battlefield, by gunfire or magic. You can make the argument that the risk you will be undertaking is the same, but in fact, it is of a different nature, and I want to assure you that you would still be brave, and fully supported by me, if you refused the risks of this terrible oath, or infiltrating behind enemy lines. These are things which frequently lead to medals on tombstones, they are not what we regularly ask of soldiers. You do have a right to refuse. ”</p><p>“Thank you, Sir.” She hadn’t seen her own father now in five years, and she felt somewhat like she badly needed that steady reassurance that she got in his eyes. But it didn’t cause her to reconsider her plan. She spoke, feeling like Russian was almost more comfortable than English to her now. In English she heard the reign of Voldemort, in Russian she heard resistance to it. Certainly, Hermione had a deep loathing for the fact the British Wizarding community had allowed this fate to befall the world, herself personally, and it coloured her next words and made her feel resolute. “Still, it’s one life for the sake of tens of millions under the Dark Lord’s reign. I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t make the effort, Sir. Not with that to gain. And the vow may not be invoked. We may pull it off in the Crimean. Isn’t that worth it?”</p><p>“We need to alert the government now, Sir,” Colonel Kabanov noted. There was no option in that.</p><p>Pronichev nodded. “State Councillor, Colonel, follow me to our secure comms station.” He rose, but then paused. “Is there anything we should know to communicate, first?”</p><p>Ginny looked up from where she had been sitting, and gently cleared her throat. “ I have something to report first, Sir.”</p><p>“Go ahead,” his kindly eyes, on an old face, focused on the redheaded witch.</p><p>“Bellatrix’s daughter is Voldemort’s. Delphi explained that to me. Her father is Voldemort.”</p><p>“She had a <em> child </em> with <em> Voldemort</em>? And was able to escape with <em> Voldemort’s daughter,</em>” Hermione goggled.</p><p>Colonel Kabanov looked at Ginny. Even he noticeably paused for a moment, and then shrugged. “Yes, that’s definitely going in the report.”</p><p>The three senior officers left at once.</p><p>Ginny immediately turned to Hermione. “You volunteered to swear an <em> unbreakable vow </em> with <em> Bellatrix … Black </em> ?”</p><p>“Have you heard the rumours of the Siege of Sevastopol?” Hermione answered, sinking down to rest her face against her hands, propped on the table. “Anything we’ve seen is ten times worse there, they speak of things…”</p><p>“Bellatrix will make sure the oath turns you into a casualty if she’s ever held accountable for her crimes, Hermione,” Ginny said flatly. “Is that what you want? So it’s not some small risk, it’s literally, for the rest of her life, if they hold her accountable, you die. I’m certain of it.”</p><p>“There’s lots of ways to hold someone accountable without sending them to Azkaban or killing them or giving them the Dementor’s Kiss,” Hermione answered. “Can we be honest about something? <em> Nobody </em> deserves Azkaban.” She looked at Ginny and Dora. “<em>Nobody. </em> I’m sorry. I know it’s comforting, it’s the way the Wizarding world has worked for centuries, that we win, and they’re all either dead or they go to Azkaban. But the worst of the Camps—Kolyma—was better than Azkaban. It is <em> not right </em> to chain people to the wall of a cell with the ocean booming against it while Dementors suck out their ability to feel happiness-- for decades on end. No matter what they’ve done.”</p><p>She rose to her feet, her words getting a little bit heated, even at her friends, planting her hands on the table and leaning in toward them as she spoke with growing intensity in her voice. “I have and always will fight against this evil, against the Death Eaters and Voldemort, but I’m doing it precisely <em> because </em> of my moral convictions. I’m going to be honest, if there are Crimes Against Humanity trials at the end of this war, there are some people in the Ministry from before Voldemort’s takeover who should be in the dock right alongside of Voldemort for participating in sentencing people, and incarcerating people in, Azkaban, and the use of Dementors to torture and execute prisoners. It was wrong. And maybe the fact that was part of our society was one of the reasons it was so easy for people to become Death Eaters. If the end result of this is that Bellatrix Black lives out the rest of her life under house arrest in some big villa in Sochi swimming in the sea every damned day, I will gladly pay that indignity to justice to liberate tens of millions of people from Voldemort—because, to be honest, it’s less of a compromise than you think, because your perception of how people should be punished has been twisted by the acceptance of Azkaban.”</p><p>Hermione let out a deep sigh. Everyone was silent in front of her. “I love both of you as sisters. But I had to say it,” she bit her lip, and reached for her pack of belomors. “I’m going to have a smoke. This is so fucked up.” With that, she turned, and saw herself out of the room.</p><p>As she left, she heard Larissa behind her say, “she is right, you know. Azkaban is ghastly, and we’re fighting to win.” And then she was away from her three friends and stepping out of the command post. Nobody was going to keep someone from smoking inside here, but Hermione wanted the cold winter air to clear her head while she did it, too.</p><p>A few minutes later, Nymphadora came out to stand alongside of her. She paused for a moment, and then asked, softly, “can you give me one of the cancer-sticks?”</p><p>“...I never thought you’d ask,” Hermione grinned. She took out a second cigarette and handed it to Dora. “Have a light,” she added as she reached for her lighter.</p><p>The older Witch took a drag from the cigarette and coughed immediately. “Oh <em> Merlin. </em> This is <em> nothing </em> like the Marlboro I had when I experimented with being a juvenile delinquent.”</p><p>“I know. They’re a nice Russian punch to the face.” Hermione turned to face Dora. “Sorry about the strong words. But I had to say it.”</p><p>“That’s just the S.P.E.W.-founding Hermione that I know,” Dora allowed with a smile. “Anyway, it’s not wrong.”</p><p>“Thank you for acknowledging that. I know as an Auror before the war, it hits close to home.”</p><p>“It does,” Dora agreed. “But you’re right. Azkaban is hell. Not going to deny it. Larissa gave us an ear-full when you left. Brought up something about the English penal law of the 18 <sup> th </sup> century being called the ‘bloody code’ and something else boring and intellectual. You would have loved it.”</p><p>“The Bloody Code,” Hermione agreed. “Yes, I would have liked to hear her <em> precis. </em> But I probably knew everything in it.”</p><p>“Okay then. So you’re – cool with this?” Dora gestured with the cigarette in her hand. “Pretending to be her prisoner, infiltrating the Army in the Crimean, Unbreakable Vow, you name it?”</p><p>“Yes, I’ve made up my mind. God help me, I’m going to do it.”</p><p>“I <em> never </em> hear you say something like that, Hermione.”</p><p>“I am an atheist,” Hermione acknowledged after a moment. “Magic is real. God is not. But I’ve never before agreed to… Everything you just said, either. So maybe now was the right time for the sentiment.”</p><p>Dora sighed. “Fair.”</p><p>“Now, I wanted to talk to you about something else.” Hermione turned to her. “Dora, I’m <em> worried. </em> You stopped being Tonks, you became Dora to us. Your son is with your mother in Nizhniy. Your entire life is on the front, with the security services. And it’s gotten so hard. You’re still a funny woman but I’ve never imagined your sense of humour being as suppressed as this ever before. There’s a hard edge. It’s scaring me.”</p><p>“I don’t owe anything to myself anymore,” Dora answered, sharply. “But I <em> do </em> owe this to Teddy. So if you’re wondering who I have become and what I’ve done to Tonks, there’s your answer, I’m a <em> mother. </em> I’ve got to end this shit so my son can have a normal life. And if I don’t? Well, I could just as easily be <em> dead </em> for him, at least this way I can see him grow up.”</p><p>“Is that really it?”</p><p>“It is,” Dora answered, sounding defiant.</p><p>“Then why not ally with Bellatrix to help win the war?” Hermione let those words sink in, and then added, softly: “This hate may seem like it’s keeping you warm, but it’s going to burn you up. Everything I’ve read agrees: Encouraging defections is the best strategy. Let’s do it. It may even let us continue executing your original plan to lure in Voldemort. ”</p><p>Nymphadora looked to her, and then nodded once. “ Alright, Hermione. We’ll do it. And… If it doesn’t work out, I’m sorry, in advance.”</p><p>“Don’t be sorry. I did it to win.”</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The Kazakh officer who had arrived at the door of her home that morning had been assiduously polite. He gave her enough time to put on her best professional business suit, wash her face with rose-water, and wave a quick spell to finish her makeup. But there was no time for food; that was provided in the back of the Mercedes limousine on the way over, where sparkling water, gutap (deep-fried herb fritters) and lamb dumplings, both of which were convenient for eating in the back of a limousine without making a mess of your fine clothes, though of course there was a large white cloth napkin that she spread first. Both were absolutely excellent, and had been kept warm in a steel drum. There was also a thermos of tea, so that she was fully refreshed and awake by the time she arrived.</p><p>Though at first she had not been sure, by the end of the drive from her home through the city, it was clear where they were headed. The Presidential Palace. Narcissa brushed down her jacket and adjusted her lapel pin and flipped up the mirror in the back of the seat in front of the passenger compartment to confirm that her hair was perfect. And then the limousine rolled into the broad circular drive in the front and came to a stop. A group of soldiers approached and came to attention on each side of the right-side passenger door, and one of them opened it as the others came to attention, hands in salute across their chests and rifles at ready, high peaked caps held on against the sharp blowing wind by their chin-straps.</p><p>“Madame Malfoy, this way, please.” One of the soldiers offered his arm, the commander of the detachment.</p><p>She accepted it, and let him lead her. Though a few years ago she would have never let a muggle touch her, in this case it was a gesture of honour, and important to the show of her control and acceptance of the situation. And really, she appreciated being treated with the respect that would be accorded a powerful person by these muggles.</p><p>Inside the palace, a man whose hair was streaked with grey was waiting, dark eyes sharp and cautious, in the uniform of a Kazakh Senior Councillor of Witchcraft. He nodded respectfully. “Madame Malfoy, if you will follow me. His Excellency is waiting.”</p><p>“Of course. Lead on.” She gestured politely, and followed him up to the President’s office, where a second Senior Councillor was staying near the President, and there were several aides—recorders, secretaries—as well as a full General, sitting quietly in the corner. And two guards at the doors, which were closed after Narcissa entered. She drew herself up before the President, sitting in his chair at his desk, and gave the wily old man a polite curtsy, as much as it pained her before a Muggle, he was a very, very cunning and dangerous Muggle, and she did respect that.</p><p>He in turn rose, and made a polite dip of his head like a gentleman, then took her head. “Madame Malfoy. Please have a seat.” He gestured to the chair which had been provided in front of his desk. “We have an important and, with my apologies for the lack of warning, extremely urgent, matter to discuss.” He was speaking in Russian, since it was definitely their shared language.</p><p>“I am happy to be of assistance to our shared cause in any way you need, Your Excellency. What is this matter?”</p><p>“I want to talk to you about your sister, Madame Malfoy.” He looked extremely serious.</p><p>For a moment she was so surprised anyway that Narcissa thought of Andromeda. That lasted for just a moment. No, he meant her other sister. <em> Bellatrix. </em> “Ah,” Narcissa delicately cleared her throat. “Bellatrix Lestrange, certainly… We have only seen each other infrequently in the recent past, Your Excellency.”</p><p>“I understand she is calling herself by her maiden name at the moment—Bellatrix Black,” President Nazarbayev answered. “She spent fourteen years in the infamous prison of Azkaban?”</p><p>“She did, Your Excellency. It destroyed her, in a fundamental way.” Narcissa was scrambling to think of why they were having this conversation and why it was important. <em> They didn’t capture her, did they? You idiot, Bella… </em> “Before that she was highly competent and highly skilled, they called her the brightest Witch of her age. It was justified. She did her duty to the family as the older sister, and honestly, she was the good one, who covered for me and my elder sister, Andromeda. I was the youngest, Your Excellency.”</p><p>Nursultan Nazarbayev was quite capable of having a disarming smile like a kindly grandfather in a moment like this, but Narcissa knew his real reputation. He wanted an accurate assessment from her. He wanted information.</p><p>“I understand they say she is insane, now,” he continued. “Do you agree with that?”</p><p>“Not in the conventional sense. She was damaged, and left unstable, by the conditions in Azkaban… Are you familiar with them, Your Excellency?”</p><p>“I was briefed,” he gave a single nod.</p><p>“Her behaviour has been erratic since that point, but I believe part of that was the effect of rediscovering emotions, after they were dampened and eater by the Dementors, Your Excellency. It is nothing like a normal prison because of their presence, or indeed anything we can imagine.” Narcissa remained as cool as she could. She still was being told nothing about the situation, and it bothered her, but she was not the one with the advantage here.</p><p>“What is your Government’s formal position on Azkaban, Madame Malfoy?” He leaned back and regarded her sharply.</p><p>“It will be closed and a thorough investigation into the influence the practices of the Ministry of Magic in dealing with magical criminals had on the current situation will be commenced,” Narcissa answered. “Dangerous criminals who cannot be safely confined in human conditions should be executed.”</p><p>“Including your sister?”</p><p>“I believe in a prison of lesser regime that she could have been rehabilitated,” Narcissa answered, keeping her eyes focused and her face composed.</p><p>“Rehabilitation would imply a separation of her loyalty from Voldemort, would it not?” His poker face still revealed nothing of the situation. The two Wizards in the room meant there was certainly no finding out by any other means, either.</p><p>“It would, Your Excellency. She followed Voldemort originally because it was an ‘acceptable’ way for her to chart her own course in life. My sister lost her dignity, and her intelligence, to be drawn into his service and validated by it. She was damned in small steps, and if she could see the whole picture… she might realise how far she has fallen.”</p><p>President Nazarbayev listened to her impassively. Then, thoughtfully, he became to speak. “Since I assumed leadership of the effort to resist Voldemort, I have considered the experiences of my ancestors and predecessors who were often faced with unfathomable or unexpected choices in the execution of grand strategy during the Great Patriotic War. My supporting your formation of a government in exile for Britain—the country which many regard, with some justice, as Voldemort’s home, his primary base of support, and therefore the cause of our pain—was based in the consideration of the fact that, within years, the German Democratic Republic became a loyal ally of the eastern bloc for forty-five years. And doing the war, of course, many governments in exile were formed, but not one for Germany. Yet the evidence from after the war suggested to me it would have been as effective and reliable as the others.”</p><p>“Now I am faced with one of these unexpected choices,” President Nazarbayev continued before Narcissa could respond. “Bellatrix Black reached out across the lines early this morning in the Caucasus. She has offered to turn her Army on the other Death Eaters in the Union, including seeking to turn the siege Army in the Crimean. If I allow her the attempt, and it succeeds entirely, eight divisions of Janissaries will switch sides, and half a million of the magically controlled troops supporting them. The whole of the southern front would be subject to an absolutely decisive turn in our favour. She calls it an alliance, Madame Malfoy. Do you believe she is sincere? I ask you as a Head of State asking a friendly leader, but also as a man asking a woman to tell him the mettle of her sister.”</p><p>Narcissa, with iron control, clamped down on any visual indication of the emotional storm within. She was so angry at Bellatrix for some things, for getting caught, for leaving her alone as the last sister, for chaining herself to Voldemort like a slave. But she had repaired her relationship with Andromeda, and now all she could do was think of the total impossibility which had just been made real. She could have a relationship with <em> both </em> of her sisters again. She could regain Andromeda and Bellatrix. It was too late for Lucius, who despite it all, she had really loved. But she could have her sisters.</p><p><em> This man does not want impertinence or emotion from you. </em> “Your Excellency, she wears her emotions on her sleeve. Her passions are as sincere as they can, admittedly, be dangerous. She is not the kind of woman for wetwork. For Voldemort, she was the one who committed ‘propaganda of the deed’, instead. What you describe to me is a very dramatic way of breaking with Voldemort—exactly in line with her sincere execution of what she regards as her interest.”</p><p>“Her interest, or her duty? I would think it the later from what you have said,” the Kazakh President observed succinctly. “Which would make treason very odd, except for the fact that I know something that I had not told you yet, Madame Malfoy. She came with a child, a daughter.”</p><p>“Delphini…” Narcissa couldn’t help it, she whispered the girl’s name. She had not told anyone else, she had not dared tell anyone.</p><p>“So you knew, then. Did you also know that the child—by the girl’s own assertion, at least—was Lord Voldemort’s?”</p><p>“I suspected. Bellatrix gave birth in the Malfoy Manor, Your Excellency. But there was no announcement, so there was nothing of relevance to share about a five year old girl.” She took a breath, and regarded him steadily. “So now you know her duty, Your Excellency, and it should all make sense.”</p><p>“It does. I will not impose the needless cruelty of waiting for my decision. I will accept her offer, Madame Malfoy. However, you will need to remain as my guest in the palace until the operation is complete. At that point, we will have to discuss the operations of the Janissary units, which I shall place under the authority of your government in exile if this operation is successful. But until that point, I cannot risk any leaks. I trust you understand?”</p><p>Narcissa rose. She understood <em> perfectly. </em> And it was simply how the game was played. “Of course, Your Excellency.”</p><p>He rose as well, and extended his hand. After that, he gestured to one of the Wizards in the room. “Senior Councillor Niyazov will show you to your rooms, and arrange for your things to be brought from your apartment. You can ask for anything you like from the kitchens. Have a good day, Madame Malfoy.”</p><p>Narcissa stepped out, not mentioning that since she had a house elf, she could easily break her isolation if she liked. However, out of the sincere hope her sister would pull off this mad scheme, she resolved to wait patiently, as the guest of the President.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. Solyanka -- a thick, spicy soup made with the brine of pickled cucumbers as the base.<br/>2. Kolyma -- Refers to camps of very strict regime in the Russian Far East for the use of penal labour in the extraction of resources; established during the purges. It is objectively true that Azkaban is much, much worse than Kolyma, which was the location of the worst of the camps.<br/>3. The Bloody Code -- the infamous period of English history in which its law code mandated death for almost every kind of crime, even simple theft. During this same period, the Empress Elizabeth of Russia famously declared that she would never execute a single subject during her reign, and did so. Larissa invokes the Bloody Code to suggest that in both the wizarding and muggle worlds, English justice is much worse than Russian justice. The era of "Penal servitude" and "Transportation to Australia" was the attempt to make English law more humane and move away from the Bloody Code.<br/>4. For the non-Russian audience, "The Great Patriotic War" is of course WWII.<br/>5. Generally from reading his recollections on events and the objective fact that he was the last Soviet era leader still in power, one gets the impression that Nursultan Nazarbayev is a man of a great insightful intelligence and natural political acumen. I think there is little doubt if the Union had not disintegrated that he would have become General Secretary and Premier.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0021"><h2>21. Power Play</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>
    <span>Chapter Twenty-One: </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Power Play</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>When they got the message from Astana that the plan had been approved, Hermione had felt the room drop a few degrees in temperature. They were now committed, they had their orders. All through the night, Lady Tamar and General Pronichev and Colonel Kabanov would be busy, laying everything into readiness, making every necessary preparation. Everyone who was entering the enemy lines to take out holdouts would be under immense risk, since if Bellatrix did not hold up her end of the deal, they would be rapidly overwhelmed by the mass of the enemy. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Nothing was left to chance, and even with that, everything was a risk. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>They had gone over the plans extensively. The instructions from Astana had even included the terms that were to be required of Bellatrix during the Unbreakable Vow, as well as the confirmation that two magically sealed letters of guarantee were coming on the fastest aeroplane possible. They covered how they would impose the conditions on Bellatrix, and how they would move in to prevent any bitter-enders from sending out warning messages to Voldemort’s forces beyond the Caucasus, with the support of jamming aeroplanes and technology as well as magic. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>At the same time, a flurry of messages went back and forth between Bellatrix’s headquarters and the 27</span>
  </span>
  <sup>
    <span>
      <span>th</span>
    </span>
  </sup>
  <span>
    <span> division, providing locations that she was expecting assistance from the 27</span>
  </span>
  <sup>
    <span>
      <span>th</span>
    </span>
  </sup>
  <span>
    <span> division in securing her own troops who would likely be loyal to Voldemort instead of personally to herself. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>The operation that Bellatrix was planning was being called “Aurora” by her Janissaries, and so that was the name they all adopted for it. Hermione found it strangely fitting, but couldn’t believe it had been Bellatrix’s idea. </span>
  </span>
</p><p><span><span>Finall</span></span><span><span>y,</span></span> <span><span>Hermione was dismissed to get some sleep for the night, but she only drifted off for two or three hours. </span></span><span><span>It was a fitful, miserable sleep, the kind where you wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if you had just stayed awake. Particularly because, in her dreams, Bellatrix came to her, looming over her, with knife in hand. The insensible brew of arousal and fear tumbled through her dreams. </span></span><span><span>Bellatrix had been like a cornered snake, coiled and hissing, during their meeting. </span></span><span><span>Bellatrix’s </span></span><span><span>last devastating demand had suggested that her powers of intellect were not lost. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione finally got up, pulled on the rest of her field uniform, and went for some tea. The field kitchen </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>managed to give her a perfectly decent breakfast of two small sandwiches with sausage and canned cheese over bread. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>She ate quickly, as soldiers do, and waited for the dawn. It seemed like she would have to wait forever for it, that was the disadvantage of not sleeping, time refused to pass quickly, even though everyone was busy around her. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Overhead the scream of a jet split the night, coming lower. It approached the short airfield in the town Natakhtari nearby, and Hermione looked up to see the massive and sleek lines of the Tu-144. These old supersonic jets, the Soviet rival to the Concorde, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>had been deeply flawed and unsafe. After the war had started, however, the need for any aircraft which could be made serviceable had led to the expedient of using enchantments and spells to remedy some of their defects. The use of this aeroplane to deliver someone to the front implied the extreme urgency which the government was treating the situation with. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>Only five minutes after the plane landed, an abrupt arrival by apparation appeared close to Hermione outside of the headquarters. She was in the uniform of a Junior Councillor, and had a massive duffel bag slung over one shoulder. Short but muscular, and obviously Kazakh, she came to attention and saluted when she saw Hermione. “Aiman Sadykova, Councillor,” she introduced herself after Hermione acknowledged the salute. “You’re Hermione Granger?”</p><p>“I am… How did you know?” Hermione couldn’t help but feel a little stiff, for this Witch, Larissa had made clear, was acquainted with what in the west would have been called the Dark Arts.</p><p>“Larissa Sergeivna has told me about you,” she answered, seeming amiable despite why she was there. “I need to report to Lady Tamar, is she inside?”</p><p>“She is,” Hermione acknowledged. “Go on ahead.”</p><p>“Thank you, Senior Councillor.” She turned away, still carrying her duffel.</p><p>Hermione looked back to the east, to the rising sun, somewhere over the Caspian a few hundred kilometres east, was sunrise. They were in the pre-dawn glow, coming up fast. Ice fog in the valleys, mist on the hills. Men were moving quickly, making preparations. Briefings were being issued, explaining the situation to the troops. They would listen in wonder, in confusion, in fear. It was a change for a strategic turn in the war. It was risky, it was daring.</p><p>Those who were scared could lean on those who cracked jokes. The gallows humour was no doubt plentiful. There would be men like Draco who had learned to somehow fight despite their fear. There would be men like her Sergeant, Vasya, who always had a joke no matter how bad it was. And there would be men like Colonel Kabanov, who had the eyes of killers, and did not shirk from what had to be done, no matter what it was. Each kind of man (and more than a few women) would fight, and collectively, they would bring victory for their Motherland.</p><p><em>Take advantage of this and drive the sword in to the hilt, </em>Hermione thought. That was the risk they were undertaking, to maximise the outcome of this defection. Then, somewhere over the hill, there was Bellatrix. Was she scared? Did she remember how to feel fear? Were her men terrified of what might happen if this failed? For all however horrible her death would be, it would certainly be much worse for the muggles who joined her in the endeavour if it failed. What kind of world was it where she had matter-of-factly advocated for Bellatrix to be their ally? <em>The same one where you were aroused by her torturing you.</em></p><p>That was a nice riposte. It bit deep and made Hermione’s heart ache, exactly like she had wanted it to. <em>That night, where you were being tortured as a child soldier who was being used even by your own side, is long past. You can look at her now and see just how desperate and disillusioned she is. </em></p><p>Her thoughts were carried away by someone apparating in. Then her eyes widened—it was Flyorov. “Vasily Gregorovich, what are you doing here?” She could see a rather grim, but also content expression on his face.</p><p>“Ahh, Hermione Alanovna. I suppose it’s natural you’d be in the thick of this, though it’s a shame.” He was heavily dressed for the weather, and she saw his wand, ready to draw quickly. “When a man gets old, some things become more important than life. You see, all this time, I’ve been confident my wife will come back to me from the front. But today she has a special mission, and it’s the kind where, if it works out, we’re all just going to sit in a building, shouting weird terminology into radio receivers.” He paused. “And as you must know, if it fails, we’re all going to die. So, I will either be there to watch history in a warm building where my old bones won’t mind in the slightest, or my wife and I will die together.”</p><p>“Happy to have you along,” Hermione forced herself to say, and she extended her hand. They shook hands, then, just as Dadiani, Pronichev and Kabanov exited the headquarters building, with Nymphadora, Aiman, Ginny and Larissa following behind.</p><p>“I’m sorry, General, that I can’t have you along,” Lady Tamar was saying. “However, you are needed here at the Divisional headquarters, to contain the situation if it goes wrong, and this is your natural battle-post anyway.”</p><p>“I know, but I’d rather share the risk.” He shook his head, then gestured to Flyorov. “Your husband?”</p><p>“Yes,” she said, and briefly introduced the two.</p><p>“If it’s too dangerous for General Pronichev, why are you going, Lady Tamar? Larissa asked. “Surely it’s not…”</p><p>“Oh, that’s quite all right, Councillor,” Tamar waved a gloved hand. “Quite the contrary, it is not too dangerous, for sometimes it is good for the lower ranks to see their commanders die. I am an old woman and my husband has volunteered to come with, there is quite literally no point in staying behind, and if this really works, we all want to see it, don’t we? Alright, it’s time. I have an image of Bellatrix’s headquarters, and we’ll be apparating directly inside. To me!”</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>They would all extend their hands… Hermione stepped forward, her stomach still filled with guilt at the exchange with Flyorov and Tamar Dadiani’s own curt dismissal for the importance of her own life. She could see Wizards and Witches preparing to apparate with bodies of troops of their own all around them, usually a squad for each one. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>They would not be following them immediately, but they would follow as soon as they received the signal to commence the operation. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>For them, the tense waiting was now at its absolute height, like an arrow nocked to the bow, waiting to be loosed. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>She could also hear the helicopters which were flying overhead with the morning’s light and that would form the next wave after they started their initial actions to secure the divisions. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then, with the usual snap, they teleported across space and straight into the ski-lodge which Bellatrix had appropriated as her headquarters. A few nervous Janissaries immediately levelled their rifles, but there was an officer there, with grey in his hair and a sharp mustachio, who quickly ordered them to be lowered. “Welcome. Lady Tamar, Colonel Kabanov?” He asked, sharply, in English. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes, that’s so. Where is Bellatrix, </span></span><span><span>if I may… General?</span></span><span><span>” Lady Tamar asked, stepping forward, the rest of the group fanning out. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Diaz,” he supplied, and turned. “This way, please.” He led them to the former dining room, and moved to sit down by the bank of radios. Bellatrix was sitting there with the pale and obviously very nervous Martin Kempler. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>He was not Imperioused, but several of the other Wizards in the room clearly were. Hermione stiffened a little, but she also acknowledged that in this dangerous and deadly circumstance, Bellatrix and those she had suborned to her side against Voldemort certainly had felt they had no other choice, and that was probably a fair assessment. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix had her head hung over </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>a massive mug of tea. She ignored them as they entered, at first, and then looked at the chronometer on her wrist, and finally spoke. “Lady Tamar, do you have the sealed letter</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> with the pardon</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> from President Nazarbayev?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes, it was counterstamped with magical seals by the Actual State Councillors of Russia and Kazakhstan, and signed by the President,” Lady Tamar answered, and presented the documentation after a nod to Aiman, who had presumably hand-delivered it to the 27</span></span><sup><span><span>th</span></span></sup><span><span> Division’s headquarters, though Hermione knew that was not the only reason she was there. Bellatrix reached out and quickly took the document, inspecting it. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then she looked up, satisfied with the wording and the signatures and seals. “The second letter, the promise for Anahit?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The second letter was also produced. It contained only a promise that every reasonable effort would be made, within the context of the limitations of the war and the need to devote the total effort to the defeat of Voldemort, but that an attempt would be made even before the war was over. Again, Bellatrix read it thoroughly, checking her chronometer halfway through. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She tossed the two letters into a bag of holding and sealed it with a magical lock. “The Oath? Who will oversee it? It must be one of pure blood, even when you’re swearing to a muddy.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I will, she’s my friend,” Larissa stepped forward. “Come on, get up and face her, Black. She’s an Officer and I won’t let you slander her again while we do this.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>You can hardly stop me if you want to win,” Bellatrix smirked, but she got to her feet. </span></span></p><p>Hermione swallowed, and turned to face her. “Bellatrix Black, maybe you should give some consideration to just how lucky you are,” she made herself say, as her emotions tottered on edge. Bellatrix had already left one mark on her. Now she was about to receive a second, and this one, voluntarily.</p><p>“Hermione, do you need anything?” Larissa asked her friend tenderly.</p><p>“No Lara, let’s get on with it.” Hermione pulled off her gloves.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>At that point, it was Bellatrix’s turn to hesitate. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Finally, she began to pull off her right glove. Her wrist was still covered by the flare of the engageante she wore. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Larissa had drawn her wand, and held it ready close between the two other women. Dark brown eyes met brown eyes. There were close to twenty people watching, and there was absolutely no way to escape now. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione reached out, and Bellatrix met her, and they held hands. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Larissa extended her wand to touch their clasped hands. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix took a breath. “Will you, Hermione Granger, use all of your power, magical, intellectual, physical, rhetorical, to guarantee my pardon and safeguard me from confinement, death, and the dementors’ kiss, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>as executed by the Confederation of Independent States</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>?”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <em>Oh Merlin I really have to do this.</em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> Hermione sucked in her breath. “I will.” Fire lashed between their hands and settled into her. She could feel the burn on her soul. Then she took her own breath. “Do you, Bellatrix Black, swear that you shall never again </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>take instruction from, or </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>obey the orders of one T</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>om Marvolo Riddle, known also as </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>Lord </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Voldemort?” </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione could see the flinch in Bellatrix’s face as she heard the natural name of her Lord spoken so plainly. She hesitated. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>Maybe she’ll break the deal and we’ll all be fighting for our lives in a moment…</em>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I will,” left her lips like a defeated sigh. A bond of fire lashed from Hermione to Bellatrix, and Bellatrix flinched. For a moment, Hermione could not remotely imagine what the woman was going through, the betrayal of Voldemort after thirty years of loyal service </span></span><span><span>and bearing his child</span></span><span><span>. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then, Bellatrix mustered herself, and set her own condition. “Will you obey me absolutely, faithfully, and promptly, in every order and instruction that I give you, for the duration of the Crimean Operation, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>placing your life between mine and any threat to it</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione froze. She knew that could well mean the Three Unforgivables. While her friends were willing to use them in war, for the sake of their patriotism, or sense of duty, or simply to win, she had not yet done so herself. Now she was being expected to do exactly that. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Under Bellatrix Black’s command. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>This is the ‘strategic turn’ that you wanted. </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>She gritted her teeth. “I will.” The second bond lashed into her. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Now she had a better idea of what to ask next. “Will you loyally conform your actions with the instructions of the lawful authorities of the Confederation of Independent States and serve as the leader of your army under their orders for the duration of the war effort against Voldemort?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I will.” Her left arm seemed to be twitching, as if something in her body rebelled at the discordance between the Dark Mark and the Oath she was undertaking now. Her dark eyes were furiously composed and certain in a way the madness had never quite allowed before. “Will you faithfully protect me for the duration of my natural life, to the limits of your ability, from any attempt to confine me, kill me, or take my soul, by any person acting unlawfully and outside the authority of the Confederation of Independent States, </span></span><span><span>including, by our agreement and by your own best effort, such duration as my life may be extended by the Lake of Anahit on Ararat</span></span><span><span>?” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <em>For life. </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>The bottom fell out of Hermione’s heart; she couldn’t believe what she was just agreeing to, but here she was. However, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>to the limits of your ability </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>meant it was a sincere bond; it was not unreasonable, it would not kill her for simply being away if someone claimed Bellatrix. She was being reasonable. “I will.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The third flame lashed into her, and she felt her entire arm quivering with magical power. Blinking hard, she started the final condition. “Bellatrix Black, will you subordinate yourself to the authority of the Government-in-Exile of Great Britain and obey its commands as its officer and subject for the rest of your natural life, against any other cause or bond you may espouse </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>or swear</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>This one, Hermione had been actually more worried about than the others. She was not actually sure that Bellatrix would agree to subordinate herself to a nebulous British government in exile. Certainly it was true that Narcissa was in charge of it at the moment, but they were not telling Bellatrix that, intentionally, as a test. So it was quite surprising that Bellatrix got a huge grin on her face when Hermione spoke the words. “Of course I will.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The third bond lashed back into Hermione, and with a burning force, the magic of Larissa’s wand sealed the Vow. It was done. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Grimacing, Bellatrix looked at her chronometer. “That took a bit longer than I thought. We need to get started now, General Diaz.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes we do, Madame Black,” he agreed, already sitting down at one of the radios, and then looked up and around at the CIS officers. “Ladies and Gentlemen, at the most, we have five hours. We either secure the front at the end of that time, or we will be found out.” Then he activated the radio. “2</span></span><sup><span><span>nd</span></span></sup><span><span> Brigade, Sixth Janissary Division, the condition is now ‘Aurora.’ Brigade headquarters confirm.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Confirmed!” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>General Diaz adjusted to the next channel. “1</span>
  </span>
  <sup>
    <span>
      <span>st</span>
    </span>
  </sup>
  <span>
    <span> Brigade headquarters, Fifth Janissary Division, the condition is now ‘Aurora.’ Brigade headquarters confirm.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione watched in some surprise as even Bellatrix grabbed a radio headset. “</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Wizard </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Post 202, the Condition is now Aurora,” the woman’s voice cut sharp like a knife. “Do you read me?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The young witch reached for a belomor. She saw that Larissa had just started smoking, too. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>Five hours. Five hours for us to succeed at Phase I of the biggest blow Voldemort’s suffered in this entire war, or die. And I’m going to be a glorified spectator for it. </em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Now, the helicopters moved in from their jumping-off points to the final positions of assault. The large numbers of teams waiting in stand-by began to apparate to their designated positions. Lady Tamar, Nymphadora and Colonel Kabanov were soon very busy with their own signalling gear, making sure that final position assignments were given and confirming that troops were on site, seizing and detaining those who </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>had been identified were threats to Bellatrix’s takeover, before they could reach out by any distant communication device and send warning.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The objective was nothing less than to completely secure the divisions—to eliminate anyone who could reach out to the Dark Lord or the rest of his forces—before that warning could be sent. Only then could the second phase of the operation—Bellatrix’s effort to secure the defection of the forces on the Crimean Peninsula—begin. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>And as the hours pas</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>sed, the Hermione began to think they might just succeed. But for her, the tension only increased. Succeeding would mean two more acts, one against Bellatrix, and one against her, that would be incredibly difficult to complete. And she was now committed to them both. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The pack of cigarettes disappeared faster than she’d ever remembered before. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>It was strange, though. One moment, in the corner of the room, she could have sworn that for a brief instant as she waited out the desperate hours, she saw a House Elf appear and quickly leave again. Maybe from the lack of sleep and the overdose of nicotine, she had started to hallucinate. </span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Everything had been done exactly as promised by the staff of President Nazarbayev’s palace. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Narcissa</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> had been allowed to write an exhaustive list of everything she wanted from her apartment, and it had been delivered within hours exactly as </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>she had wanted. First, though, she had done a quick test of the wards of the Palace, and confirmed that in fact, a House Elf would have difficulty with the defences prepared by the Kazakh Ministry of Witchcraft. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>So she found a way around it. She requested her necklace be returned to the apartment for secure storage, and wrapped a small enchanted message into it. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>This message instructed her House Elf to hide in the old (and quite substantially large, the size of a cabinet) magical radio that she had enchanted for listening to magical broadcasts, which had seemed like a reasonable, if irritatingly awkward, request. It would be incredibly hard for even an elf to hide in it, but sure enough, by the time she was ready to go to bed that evening, Mardy was there, having been carried innocuously through the wards. By then, Narcissa had taken a bath, and coincidentally established some protective wards to make sure she could not be overhead, by electronics or by magic. She considered that a common-sense move that anyone observing her would expect even if her intentions were pure: She was a Pureblood Lady, not a moron, after all. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>So Narcissa had written a message, enchanted to guarantee its authenticity, and given it to Mardy. “Get this to Mistress Bella,” she ordered. Mardy had been one of the Black house elves who had followed her as part of her dowry to the Malfoy; that meant her magic was still partially linked to the Black and she would certainly be able to find Bellatrix anywhere in the world. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The message had been simple:</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <em>Bella, </em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <em>I knew that ever since you helped me swear the unbreakable vow with Severus Snape and did not betray my confidence or my Son to the Dark Lord, that your heart still valued your sister more than your allegiance to the Dark Lord. On this hour, I would tell you that I have positioned myself to lead the government of Britain, and I will again bear true friendship to you if you will stay my side. The past has been Hell for you, I know, but the future is not written. Be my Bella, and I will be your Cissy. I am in a position, and have a plan, to protect your life, soul and freedom. </em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <em>Sincerely, </em>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <em>Cissy.</em>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Of course, Mardy would not be able to return to the Palace. “I will be leaving Mistress alone…” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Mistress Bellatrix needs you more. Stay with her until I can send for you again from my apartment,” Narcissa </span></span><span><span>answered. ‘Now go, and may your faithfulness guide you.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Mardy had apparated away, and left Narcissa alone in the admittedly wonderful suite to settle down for sleep. She slept better than most others involved in the effort that night. Narcissa was at peace with her decisions, because they were governed by her family, and she loved her family above all other things. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Breakfast had been as superb as everything else about her quarters. They were everything that a Pureblood could expect, if a little new and ostentatious in a way which reminded her that wealth and luxury had only recently returned to this city which until a few years before the war had just been an industrial town and railroad junction. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She was served sharlotka, and fried eggs with cheese, sausage, and dill, all with elaborate preparation. It was quite hearty, suited for winter, with the apples doubtless brought from Alma-Ata, which had more variety than any other place on Earth. There was nothing to do except to go over all of the business of the Government-in-Exile, to write up reports, to dictate to her auto-quill more messages to be sent out, to review documents. All of this had been allowed to her. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>But in the end, the tension got to her, as well. She was not sure how long she would be held, or when she would be told of the outcome of the effort. Bella might already be dead, and Narcissa would not know. Perhaps not for days, or even weeks, depending on how her comfortable confinement was being interpreted as necessary for the requirements of state security. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>After working for five hours or so and taking lunch, she moved to sit on the couch in the study, and stop working for a while. It had just gotten too much, and even lunch hadn’t really distracted her from what might be happening. The chance to renew her relationship with her sister had been dangled in front of her, and now she would just have to pay a penance until it was done, or she lost Bella forever. </span>
  </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>-- It should observed that the real risk in the operation was always from notification being sent out and imperilling Phase II. <br/>-- I assume much more effort to use magic to remedy defects in technology will be undertaken as the mingling of the muggle and wizarding worlds continues. <br/>-- Part of Narcissa's scene is retrospective, happening before the first section of this chapter.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0022"><h2>22. Blood Atonement</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter 22: Blood Atonement</p><p> </p><p>Even if Bellatrix was an erratic factor on the top, and perhaps precisely because, unlike the other Death Eaters, she did not make a pretence of stability, her staff’s work was surprisingly good. They were used to implementing her brilliant schemes, and Aurora was not substantially different from the other daring actions they had undertaken for her, except that she now turned against her Master, the Dark Lord.</p><p>What followed was four and a half hours of precise and systematic actions. Helicopters moved across the front quickly, and tanks crossed what had been the lines, to support allies who were former enemies. Small teams working with Wizards and Witches moved deep behind the lines, some of the Wizards having been carefully selected to work with teams from the various Spetsnaz units.</p><p>What there was <em> not </em> was extensive use of armed force. This was a matter of talking, of intimidation, of forcing surrenders, and of the application of force like the scalpel: The precision elimination of those targets which were bound to otherwise provide resistance. A Russian witch would distract a Wizard loyal to Voldemort, make him report an infiltration to a command staff that was now his enemy, his own men would shoot him in the back. Or he would be pinned in place and dealt with by a sniper, or hit with overwhelming force of five or six Wizards at once. In this way they went through a list of four hundred who would not defect, and eliminated them quickly or secured them. A few hundred more had already been detained or disappeared the night before by Bellatrix’s men, and some more subjected to the Imperious curse.</p><p>As the sun rose in the sky, these swift and sharp actions occasionally punctuated a position with gunfire. But they did not lead to large-scale fighting. Large scale fighting would mean the death of them all early on, and as the operation progressed and Hermione grew more hopeful, the risk instead became that Phase II would be imperilled and impossible, rather than a total failure of the operation.</p><p>These heroes, who had been born as normal men and women, who were Wizards or Muggles, had been trained in special tasks or had come to them by assignment to the crack units or the Wizard Protection Battalions. Likely, most of them had not sought out an assignment where each bullet might tell the fate of an operation which would either doom them, or liberate tens of millions. But all of them executed their orders, and dared to win.</p><p>Then the sun was high in the sky, fighting to make itself seen through the snow flurries. The faint cracks of the rifles, the dramatic colours and roar of magical combat, faded away. The radio channels had remained silent. The means of long-ranged magical communication had been seized. There was a slowly dawning realisation that they had won.</p><p>It was not some single dramatic moment. The situation reports began to simply say “all is well”, “situation under control”, “all targets neutralised”. This is the way that the situation slowly became calm. In these isolated valleys and hillsides, there was peace again, though since it was winter, only the jackdaws rose into the air under the lightly falling snow.</p><p>Outside, Hermione could hear singing, though she could not identify the language, or the song. Nonetheless, it made General Diaz stiffen, and then smile, faintly. He acknowledged one more status report, and then cleared the boards, opening all the channels. “Secure from Aurora, maintaining security posture Alpha. Resume all normal radio traffic. Headquarters, Out.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked up sharply. “General Diaz?”</p><p>“Madame Black,” he answered, and his voice was cool but calm, and very matter-of-fact, “We have secured the front.”</p><p>“That’s only half-fucking-way,” Bellatrix muttered, and pushed herself to her feet, looking around with eyes that seemed sallow and baggy, her exhaustion creeping through. “Still, it is done, Lady Tamar.”</p><p>“It is done,” Tamar Dadiani agreed. “You have done your utmost, and from Makhachkala to Vladikavkaz, from the Ossetian frontier to Grozny, you have restored our position to what it was in September. Of course, while I understand the temptation to rest on your laurels, Madame Black, the reality is that our agreement is quite clear. You need to begin the Crimean Operation, under the terms you agreed.”</p><p>Bellatrix’s expression turned baleful for a moment, and she reached down for her wand, but just held her hand against it, and spun sharply away on the heel of one of her boots to turn her back, lest anyone think she meant to fight. "I <em>said </em>it was only half done, Dadiani!"</p><p>“They want to see Madame Black,” General Diaz murmured, interjecting. “They want to know she really led them, that she’s really on their side, that the second most powerful Witch in the world is still here to protect them in this stroke. Give us a few more minutes.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked to her own subordinate with a quizzical expression for a moment, then she gave a firm nod. “Lead on, General.”</p><p>The entire group began to move. Larissa whispered something to Aiman Sadykova, who remained behind and went for her duffel bag. But Bellatrix was at least not there to see it.</p><p>Easily more than three thousand troops had gathered in front of the headquarters. The sight brought Bellatrix to a stop. Then, something seized her. She extended an arm to Jorge Diaz, and the man supported her as she hefted herself up onto the bonnet of a Land Rover from the staff pool. Standing there, she drew her wand and powered a simple spell to drive a beam of blacklight into the sky.</p><p>The blacklight shined in strange ways off of the clouds which occasionally brought down the snow, its reflection lost before it reached the mountains shrouded in the mist. Bellatrix seemed to entrance the men, who quieted down to turn toward her. Then Hermione realised she was looking, too. Bellatrix had, unsurprisingly, enchanted herself with a particularly powerful charm spell, and done it subtly as she moved to hop up on the auto. The reality was that if a Witch wanted a large group of muggles to pay attention to her, she could have that happen.</p><p>Bellatrix began to speak, then, confident and boisterous. “I have been told that we will be the troops of the British Government in Exile. Accordingly, we will be liberating all of your homelands. We’re going to fucking win. That’s all I’ve got to say for you lot of muggle blackguards and scoundrels.”</p><p>Bellatrix had been unable to resist being derisive to the men. But the casual way she had cursed her way through a short and blunt speech, actually was exactly what these brutal veterans preferred to hear. And they interpreted—intentionally or otherwise—her old-fashioned English a somewhat different way.</p><p>“<em>Black Guards! Black Guards! Black Guards!” </em></p><p>Their voices reached a roaring crescendo, as Bellatrix stood there, still holding her light aloft. She was confused, Hermione was sure, but also adapting with terrifying speed. Some of the archaic, stuffy language that still used thanks to her upbringing in the House of Black had also let her use a word that, as a joke—and if it was a joke, Bellatrix didn’t realise it—or as a sincere gesture, if a somewhat mocking one, the former Janissaries had taken as their own. They were Bellatrix Black’s troops, they were under blacklight from her wand in the hour of victory, and … They were the Black Guards.</p><p>Men began to fire their guns into the air. It was a moment when discipline was either lost, or <em> created. </em></p><p>General Diaz leapt up onto the bonnet of the Land Rover with Bellatrix. “Viva la Guardia Negra!” Almost all the men from the Latin countries understood this at once, and a second roar ripped through the mass.</p><p>Hermione pressed up to the more senior officers. “Is this… <em> Good </em> ?” She asked, tautly.</p><p>“Yes, it is,” Colonel Kabanov answered, surprising Hermione. “Councillor, we will have to rely on these men for much of the offensive operation, because we cannot get our own in position in time. They are establishing an <em> esprit d’corps </em> which will let them fight hard enough to do their job despite their defection and the loss of their purpose and chain of command. So we will let this happen.”</p><p>“Thank you, Colonel,” Hermione answered automatically. She shifted to be closer to Larissa, and before speaking, wordlessly took the Russian woman’s offer of a light for a cigarette. “Lara, that song from before—I think it was from that group, over there.” Hermione pointed to one group of soldiers. “I think you recognised it?”</p><p>“Yes,” Larissa answered. “It’s called ‘Wo alle Straßen enden’. When All the Roads End. Like most German songs, it’s quite bloody-minded, but especially so, since it dates from the First World War: The chorus, ‘Wir sind verloren’, translates as ‘We Are Lost’.”</p><p>“<em>Merlin. </em> And they sing it with such a jaunty air…” Hermione shook her head.</p><p>“I would, if I was a German,” Larissa tossed back at her with a jaunty grin of her own and then took a drag on her cigarette. “She worked up those mercenaries pretty nicely. Of course, when the rush is all over, all they’ll care about is that we’ve taken over paying them at the same rate.”</p><p>“You think that’s all that matters to them?”</p><p>“Not all, but most. They did volunteer to be Janissaries, after all. Fuck them.” Larissa shrugged. “At least the Germans, when they came, were fighting for something they believed in. It was wicked and evil, but they had convinced themselves it mattered to their country and family. These guys just don’t care.”</p><p>“Like the Catholic mercenaries who sacked Rome in fifteen twenty-seven, and almost killed the Pope,” Hermione answered thoughtfully, from her study of military history. “I suppose you’re right.”</p><p>“I usually am.” Larissa grinned. “ When we finish our smoke, we should go get some food. Before what happens next, I mean.” Her look was distant for a moment. “Something to settle the stomach.”</p><p>Larissa’s words, innocent enough, still made Hermione think of the magnitude of what she had just agreed to, and the risks she was about to undertake. And it was clear from Larissa’s distant look that her friend was fully cognizant of it, too. “Yeah…” A shiver ran through her, and she took a hard drag of her cigarette. She watched Bellatrix accept General Diaz’s help down from the bonnet of the Land Rover, then she turned away with her friend. It made her look somewhat vulnerable to accept the help down, and softened her. Mentally, Hermione didn’t feel like she was ready to deal with the fact that the Death Eater was on her side now, but it didn’t matter; she had already committed herself to it. <em> So what the hell is Lara going to find for me to eat that I won’t throw up? </em></p><p>That thought, at least, made her grin, as she kicked out the stub and followed Larissa to find the chow.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>When Hermione and Larissa returned from lunch, they were hustled upstairs to where, in the largest suite of the old lodge, the others were waiting. They entered the main room to see Bellatrix there, standing and frozen in place as Aiman Sadykova laid out a beautifully engraved golden limb, setting and adjusting pins on the end. A cauldron bubbled with what looked like angry blood, and a sizeable tub waited on the floor. There were bandages, and a rack of potions in greens and yellows close to a chair draped with towels, and another tub below it, empty.</p><p>Aiman was wearing a sharply curved Aldaspan at her side. She pointedly ignored Bellatrix as if they had already had a sharp exchange.</p><p>Bellatrix had looked as frozen as a statue, but when Larissa and Hermione entered, she came alive and spun to face them. When she did, the anger in her eyes flashed at Larissa, first. “We have come this far, we have been this successful and you’re really going to go forward with having this steppe Shaman <em> cut my fucking arm off </em> when we’re in the middle of battle? What is it really, Naryshkina? Some sense of blood vengeance for your people, a literal pound of blood before you let me go?”</p><p>“As I explained once already,” Lady Tamar spoke before Larissa could answer, “this was part of the agreement. It’s necessary to dupe Voldemort into thinking you are still at the front, still commanding your Army. You agreed to it, and it’s a condition of your pardon. And let me add that you’re damned right we’re going to take our pound of flesh. You’re wounded our land and killed our people. We extend to you the hand of friendship and merely ask you to sacrifice alongside of us. So stop harassing the Junior Councillor for her suggestion because I am the one who assented to this Dark Magic for the sake of our victory, I am the one who holds the command responsibility here, and I will see it through, Bellatrix Black!”</p><p>Bellatrix’s face stiffened in a rictus for a moment, though her eyes flickered to Hermione, before she turned back to face Lady Tamar. “Then let’s get on with it.” She sneered at Sadykova. “You better make sure that blade is sharp. I won’t give you a second swing to torture me for your own kicks, Shaman.”</p><p>“You are masking your fear with haughtiness and anger, Madame Black,” the woman answered in a smooth but heavy accent, drawing the sword, and swinging it in the room, ignoring the close proximity to others. They were used to danger, and did not flinch. She spun the blade faster and faster, until it lightly hissed through the air. “You are a noblewoman, so I’m going to use a <em> sword </em> . Can you at least be brave?”</p><p>“Witch of the First Class Sadykova, that will be enough,” Lady Tamar said sharply. “Don’t bait her. Madame Black, get in the chair, please.”</p><p>Bellatrix stood there. She looked down at her bare hands, at her covered sleeves. Then she looked up again. “What happens if I don’t?”</p><p>“We have a fight, and kill you, because your unbreakable vow will only apply if you go ahead and follow through with the whole deal, including the Crimean Operation. In fact, depending on how the Vow interprets the situation, it might kill you for me,” Tamar shook her head, chuckling. “I would say, Madame Black, that you simply have no alternative.”</p><p>Bellatrix glared at her, and then took the steps, and flung herself into the chair. “Alright. Here I am. Sitting in the chair,” her voice sing-songed, sounding almost like a child. “Are you quite happy now?”</p><p>“Fabulous,” Lady Tamar shrugged with droll sarcasm.</p><p>Bellatrix shot her a glare, before reaching down and beginning to slowly strip off the engageante on her left arm. As she did, Hermione could see a little quiver slip through her. When it reached the end of her arm, Hermione could see, revealed after one last moment of hesitation, something in a way more awful than the Dark Mark. The Dark Mark gleamed with sinister power.</p><p>The wicked, hideous, piled up scar on her wrist, which surely must still hurt or make movement of her wrists painful at least, that was another matter. That had been created by the massive chains which bonded her in Azkaban, spending fourteen years in chains.</p><p>Fourteen years in chains, while the waves boomed against the walls, and the Dementors sucked away any happiness that she felt. Fourteen years, with the manacles rubbing those scars raw again and again, and then building up, and generating a new, ugly layer, until they were left almost like a hideous ring of distorted flesh, torn and twisted and raised, where a delicate wrist should have been.</p><p>Now, Hermione finally clearly understood Bellatrix’s veritable uniform, the choice of clothing to always conceal her arms despite the fact that she might well have had pride in the Dark Mark, and the real reason for it. She closed her eyes. <em> How did we all just go along with this? </em></p><p>Then she forced herself to open them again. <em> I will be a witness. I will not flinch from what this woman must do. </em> She watched as Bellatrix extended her arm across the simple and quickly made wooden frame to hold it secure. Bellatrix settled her arm down onto the crudely made padding of a chopped up blanket.</p><p>It was then that Hermione could see the look of the woman’s face. The discomfort, and the hints of real fear that she had tried to restrain for so long. She had cast herself alone in the entire world, and now the people who had promised her a pardon, were also about to cut her arm off to rid her of the Dark Mark. It was not a group of people that Bellatrix could remotely trust.</p><p>She was having to trust them anyway.</p><p>Aiman set the sword aside for the moment, and came to Bellatrix, offering a jar with bubbling potion in it. “Drink this.”</p><p>“Is it for the pain?”</p><p>“It’s to prevent infection and prepare the body to help with healing,” Sadykova answered. “The next will be for pain.”</p><p>“All right.” Bellatrix drank it. The room, with its faded skiing pictures on the walls and faded comforter on the bed, felt smaller than it had a moment before. The pretences were stripped away. The Dark Magic of Voldemort was about to be pitted against the Dark Magic of the Black Court of Koldovstoretz.</p><p>Aiman quickly handed her the second potion, and watched as Bellatrix drank all of that, as well. “Let me know when you’re comfortably numb.”</p><p>As the second potion hit her, it reduced Bellatrix’s inhibitions. “Darling, you don’t know Pink Floyd like I know Pink Floyd,” she muttered, watching with what was now kind of a detached interest as Aiman coated a paste of some kind of third potion on her upper arm.</p><p>“Hmm?” The Kazakh witch, who was now very much in control of the situation, glanced with arch curiosity to Bellatrix for a moment.</p><p>“English bands,” Hermione felt herself moved to say. “I..” <em> She really listened to muggle music? </em> “Muggle bands,” she added, with a bit of defiance.</p><p>“Music’s music,” Bellatrix slurred, and turned to Hermione. For a moment, the eyes of the two women met. Hermione could plainly see the fear that now laced through Bellatrix’s eyes. Where once they had been so grey and morbid, now they were relaxed, and betrayed, like the rapidly-changing clouds above, her real fear.</p><p>Hermione was frozen in place by that look. She wanted to believe there was someone, anyone, on the planet who would treat the person behind those grey eyes with dignity and respect, even if she didn’t really believe it was warranted. She wanted to think that Narcissa would welcome her sister back. Perhaps, that Andromeda would welcome her sister back.</p><p>They were both far away, and Bellatrix was here, now, in the process of having her arm which bore the Dark Mark severed from her body by a sword. <em> Will you be measured by hate, or by forgiveness? </em> Hermione asked herself. Then, very deliberately, she took a step forward, and then another. She reached out—her gloves pulled off before for lunch, and kept off in the warmth—and wrapped her bare hands around Bellatrix’s right hand, and held it.</p><p>“Mudblood, what the hell are you doing?”</p><p>“Holding your hand,” Hermione answered matter-of-factly as she clasped Bellatrix’s in both of her own, and electing to ignore the barb.</p><p>Bellatrix focused on her and keened a sharp laugh. “No shit? I thought they said you were smart, muddy. I repeat: What are you doing? I’m quite sorry, but most of those words were already monosyllabic, so I can’t make it simpler for you...”</p><p>The sword swished through the air, and descended with the sharp skill of a well-trained fencer, and dancer of the flankirovka. The steel glinted in the artificial light of the room, the blade descended, and a splash of <em> Toujours Pur </em> blood flashed through the air, and whetted the hunger of the blade. The crack of bone cleanly cut followed it, sectioned neatly at one of the places where a surgeon would have been hard-pressed to make a surgical amputation nearly so skilled as this one wrought by the blade.</p><p>Those grey eyes were fixed in a rictus of perfect agony for one moment, and one moment only, and then she screamed, sharp and unbridled, wild and agonising. Bellatrix seemed to pour her soul into that cry, and everyone in the room, magically touched, Wizards and Witches, felt something, as if perhaps something had been severed from Bellatrix that was more significant to the magical world than just her left arm.</p><p><em> The Dark Mark, </em> Hermione wondered, and squeezed the woman’s hand, out of a sense of duty if nothing else. Out of a sincere conviction that nobody deserved to suffer alone, forgotten, and far from their family. It was one thing to kill. It was another thing to suffer, and she would never permit herself to tolerate it.</p><p>Or at least, so she told herself.</p><p>Aiman moved quickly now. She slathered another of the potions, a thick paste, onto the stump of Bellatrix Black’s left arm. As she did, the bleeding immediately stopped. Then she took the arm itself from the frame, and placed it in one of the tubs on the floor. Over it, the contents of the cauldron was poured, and she began to chant in a tongue older than Latin, a tongue of the steppe. As she chanted, she approached Bellatrix’s side, and took the tub which had collected the blood which had flowed from her arm.</p><p>At the culmination of the chant, she overturned the tub, and added Bellatrix’s own blood to the blood-like potion which now ensconced the severed arm. A rippling of red light, a strange black miasma, flushed out from the tub, and washed over them with a cool and clammy feel.</p><p>For the first time in her adult life, Bellatrix Black was free of the Dark Mark. Her head lolled to the side. She no longer protested that Hermione was holding her hand. Her grey eyes flickered dimly, and the woman could not bring herself to focus on anything, let around the tub holding her severed arm, drenched in the contents of the cauldron and her own blood, and thus, in a strange way, kept still alive.</p><p>Aiman Sadykova knelt by the tub, and reached out to delicately put a finger in the slurry of potion and blood, and then raise it to her lips. She closed her eyes for a moment, and shuddered, then nodded. “Yes, it has worked.”</p><p>“Bellatrix,” Hermione said, trying to get her attention, “it’s done.”</p><p>“Ugh… My voluntary mutilation,” the woman below her laughed hoarsely, completely manic and yet still numb, uninhibited, distant under the influence of the potion, managing it all at once. “Making myself uglier. Great. Just what I wanted! I… New arm?”</p><p>“I have to check, Madame Black,” Aiman answered, rising to use a rag to clear some of the thick potion from the stump of Bellatrix’s left arm. “Yes, it’s physically complete, though the shock will linger for some areas, and there are more potions to give you.”</p><p>Hermione helped steady Bellatrix while Aiman brought the next. The dark witch could barely keep it down, but she managed. Then there was a second, and a third, until Bellatrix was nearly growing with the discomfort of trying to swallow, to make her digestive system function, when her entire body wanted to curl in on itself in agonising pain and the disorientation and shock of having lost a limb. After that, the rest of the potion on the stump of the limb was finally cleared away.</p><p>Next, Aiman brought forth the golden limb. She pushed it into place, noted the length, and made a few adjustments.</p><p>Bellatrix didn’t look. Instead, she kept her head turned away—toward Hermione. “You’re still holding m’hand, muddy,” her voice whispered in a tone that managed to be husky, to be sultry, even in a crazy, brutal moment like this.</p><p><em> So I am. </em> “You still look like you need it.”</p><p>Bellatrix cackled, shaking the cascade of curls on her head, and then winced at a particularly sharp motion as Aiman adjusted the pins and set the final length. “Muddy, what I need right now is a single malt scotch, not a sack of dirty blood keeping my hand warm.”</p><p><em> She’s a remarkably bad liar when she’s in pain, </em> Hermione thought, and refused to go anywhere.</p><p>With the pins set, Aiman coated the joint of the limb in the drying remains of the blood which Bellatrix had shed, and began a new incantation, though it was in the same tongue. At the end, the limb jerked, and with it, Bellatrix’s whole body, as if she had had a muscle spasm or an electric shock.</p><p>“<em>Merlin! Fuck. </em> ” Bellatrix cursed, and then blinked, realising she had an arm which again responded to commands, sensation, and feeling. It was just gleaming and made out of hollow golden tubes, covered with golden plate, formed into the shape of a natural human arm, but covered in ancient runes.</p><p>“You will,” Aiman observed coldly, “Be in a great deal of pain and discomfort. You see, normally one must let the stump heal for at least a week before the integration of the artificial limb begins, but I was informed that was not acceptable in this circumstance. Likewise, your natural arm will remain alive for two weeks, so you have those two weeks to complete your mission in. I do wish you luck, Madame Black. While you have insulted me, and my family is as old and pure as your’s, even if we had yurts and a herd of Pegasuses and not your fancy mansion, I do want you to succeed, and will forgive much if it happens.” She straightened. “I am done here,” she then announced matter-of-factly, and turned to begin assembling her things.</p><p>“Then who will help me into that damned bed?” Bellatrix asked with a cold sweat across her brow.</p><p>“Mudblood, apparently,” Hermione couldn’t help a smirk.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'll add more notes tomorrow. Writing this chapter was too emotionally draining to provide them with the publication.</p><p>Okay! It's tomorrow.</p><p>1. The sack of Rome in 1527 was a fairly legendary moment when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's Army mutinied, marched on Rome, and sacked the city, very nearly killing the Pope, despite the fact that the Emperor Charles himself was, of course, a Catholic. But this is what happens when you don't pay your mercenaries. The situation was somewhat more complicated than that, sure, but the bottom line is that what Bellatrix is engineering here is much the same. Thanks to her reading in military history since the war began, Hermione would be quite acquainted with the event. Voldemort's forces have no loyalty to him, so Bellatrix essentially offered them a better deal, and they flipped quickly. They are mercenaries.</p><p>2. The English translation of the German song the mercenaries sing, I provide below:</p><p>We are lost...</p><p>Where all roads end<br/>our path doesn't stop.<br/>Wherever we turn<br/>time takes its course.<br/>The heart burned<br/>banished in pain.<br/>So we go lost through, the grey no-man's land.<br/>Maybe none of us will return, back to our homeland.</p><p>We are lost...</p><p>It is a real German marching song of the First World War, that the soldiers sang as the end drew near on the western front. German bloody-minded songs of this type are often sung to quite the intense or jaunty tune. Another good example is "Wir lagen vor Madagaskar", in which you happily sing about the plague and thirst killing everyone on your wrecked ship. However, this is by no means unique to the Germans, in fact, I think Russia has a better talent for making songs about everyone dying sound stirring and patriotic. </p><p>3. Guards/Guard. This is a funny English-ism. In most languages you would straightforwardly translate the name of an elite unit as "Guard", without the plural -- adding the plural makes it sound like a group of actual guards, not a single unit. However, in English an elite military unit is properly referred to as a "Guards" unit with the plural. In Russian the word is Гвардия (Gvardiya), which creates a clear difference from a simple "Guard" whereas in English the use of the word is totally contextual, except for this plural. </p><p>4. Aldaspan is the name of a kind of Kazakh scimitar.</p><p>5. The fundamental tension of this scene, I think, is that the act is absolutely necessary, because they must hide Bellatrix's movements from Voldemort until the operation is over. So she has to lose her arm. But still, are these people, who are patriotic, and in the midst of war, feeling a bit bloodthirsty that this Death Eater, this criminal, will be allowed to escape justice, and therefore giving in to the fact that, at least, cruel necessity gives them the opportunity to take a "pound of flesh"? Yes, this is absolutely the case, and I feel that it's necessary and totally human to portray them this way. It in no way impeaches on their character. They are soldiers, and they are about to, for the sake of victory, be friendly with someone who was in Voldemort's inner circle when the nukes flew. They want some kind of expatiating sacrifice. But it was necessary; it was no easy magic to remove the Dark Mark from Bellatrix, it demanded a cruel sacrifice in blood, for it is Dark Magic too powerful to accept anything else.</p><p>6. The Flankirovka is a kind of dance with swords. I'm using the term somewhat generically here to refer to any such custom of the steppe, whereas properly it refers to the dance of the Cossacks.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0023"><h2>23. The Shadow of the Valley</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter 23: The Shadow of the Valley.</p><p> </p><p>Rumours spread fast, and the sooner they got moving, the better. The next morning, Bellatrix and General Diaz arrived at the lodge’s dining room, once more being used for dining, at least, for breakfast. Since the supplies were still there, and they wouldn’t last forever, the table which was set for them all was a fine English breakfast.</p><p>Hermione came down with Larissa from the room they had awkwardly shared that last night. In the army life, there were many indignities, but perhaps the oddest was sharing a bed with a comrade out of simple necessity and lack of space. They both came up short. On the table there were melons and apples, peaches and plates of sliced pears. They both had to remember their discipline, and present themselves to Lady Tamar.</p><p>“Officers, I invite you to the table,” she offered, and then they both sat.</p><p>Hermione couldn’t help but feel that Bellatrix was watching her, and her out of the corner of her eye, she saw the woman at the opposite head of the big oval, General Diaz to her right. She looked as bad as the day she had left Azkaban, and had a faint quiver from the stress and shock. She was nursing a drink that visibly bubbled, and was probably a potion from a mediwitch. And quite notably, while she had taken the glove off of her right hand, she was again wearing an engageante on both arms… And still had the glove on her left. Between the two, she fully concerned her golden arm, so that she looked as if she still had her natural arm.</p><p>Even Nymphadora, when she arrived, was taken in more by the fresh fruit than by Bellatrix. Both Larissa and Hermione filled their plates, and Ginny was down a moment later to join them, her eyes wide. “Oh wow, I haven’t seen a spread like that in <em> years. </em> ” She looked a bit guilty as she sat alongside Nymphadora and they all tucked in with a mildly embarrassed indecency, except for Bellatrix, who picked at some of the fruit with an idle distraction.</p><p>“Mum, why don’t you want to eat?”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes widened and her look shot to begin Bellatrix. She realised that she had missed that Delphini was sitting at a small, short table behind her mother, in the style of the aristocracy.</p><p>“Mum’s had her arm chopped off,” Bellatrix answered with a kind of morose dryness which was simultaneously painful and funny and awful in how she matter-of-factly said it to a five year old. “So she’s not very hungry.”</p><p>“... Mum, you’ve still got your arms.”</p><p>Bellatrix paused from nibbling on a grape, and turned around, a crooked smile touching her lips. “It’s magic,” she said, and for a moment, the smile had a ghost of sincerity in it.</p><p>The fruit was followed by the coffee urn, and with it, lamb chops, with a salad of sliced tomato and lettuce, poached eggs on toast, and deviled lobster. Some of Bellatrix’s ‘guests’ could not hide their shock at the elaborate meal, but Bellatrix turned back from her daughter, still with a faintly bemused and still indulgent look. “They send me all of this fresh food because I’m a Death Eater, and I don’t really know what to do with it.”</p><p>
  <em> This is like something out of a family Manor in the old times, the Edwardian era. </em>
</p><p>“What did you do with it before now, Madame Black?”</p><p>“I gave away the rest to the soldiers of the Corps. It seemed stupid to let it go to waste. The same now – it will run out instantly, of course, when we make our turn.” Bellatrix’s eyes seemed to flash with a kind of dangerous mirth. “But I understand that the Russian combat rations are the best.”</p><p>“There’s always meat, though if you have doubts about where it’s from, it’s best to ignore them,” Larissa raised her glass. “Still, you set a good table, Madame Black. I will remember it even if it may be the only time I enjoy it.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked at the Russian pureblood with a faintly baleful air, considering that the amputation had been Larissa’s idea. But then she shrugged. Her face still looked horrible from the shock, though she had managed to work her way through the potion she was drinking, and was now on coffee and deviled lobster. “Well, Councillor, I am a witch of class and taste.”</p><p>“Since it turns out you know muggle songs, I thought it was wealth and taste,” Ginny couldn’t resist the bait to compare Bellatrix to the subject of the Rolling Stones’ <em> Sympathy for the Devil. </em></p><p>“Oh, Weasel, can’t you muggle-botherers ever keep the peace?” Bellatrix rolled her eyes.</p><p>“I’m sure it was just a coincidence,” Hermione intervened between them.</p><p>As the meal wound on, the attendants even brought in Perrier and the option of mimosas, and the plates were cleared away. As she ate, Hermione couldn’t quite resist to engage with Bellatrix again. “I am very curious, Madame Black,” she turned to face her torturer head-on, “how you came to hear Muggle music?”</p><p>“Well, Mudblood, as it happens, Wizards like to listen to enchanted radios, but it’s actually quite possible…” Bellatrix was abruptly interrupted.</p><p>“Perhaps,” Flyorov interjected, putting his fork down quietly, but deliberately, “You should realise that it’s impolitic in your circumstance to call an Officer of the Russian Federation by that name.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked very cold for a moment. Then she reached for the mimosa pitcher and poured herself one. “They say,” she declared conversationally, “that I shouldn’t mix alcohol with the potion I just drank—but fuck them.” She raised the glass and downed half of it before looking sharply at Hermione. “<em>Councillor Granger, </em> it’s quite possible to turn the channel on a Wizard radio and listen to the Muggle tunes. In those days, the best stations where the ones where long, smokey, enchanting tunes were played late at night by DJ’s who rambled about conspiracy theories and New Age-y topics. Why, I still have a fondness for one live recording about thirteen minutes long going off on Nostradamus and oil and some such. Lovely, though he was a rotten Diviner, really.”</p><p>“<em>A king shall fall and put to death by the English parliament shall be; Fire and plague to London come in the year of six and twenties three; An emperor of France shall rise who will be born near Italy; His rule cost his empire dear, Napoloron his name shall be. From Castile does Franco come and the Government driven out shall be; An English king seeks divorce, and from his throne cast down is he; One named Hister shall become a captain of Greater Germanie; No law does this man observe and bloody his rise and fall shall be</em>,” Hermione rhymed the lyrics, holding a glass of Perrier, and then smiled tightly and concluded with a soft: “I <em> am </em> a history nerd, Madame Black. I think that was Al’s performance live at the Roxy in 1973.”</p><p>Bellatrix flashed a look around the table and her eyes glinted. “Perhaps you’re not completely stupid after all. It will be interesting to spend a few days alone with you.”</p><p>Hermione’s smile died on her face. She had been avoiding thinking about that as much as she possibly could. “We have a mission to execute together, Madame Black, and I will drink to its success,” she answered tautly.</p><p>Bellatrix smirked and leaned forward, her décolletage pressing against the table as she raised her glass. “What would a muggle say…? Westminster Abbey or Glorious Victory, I think?”</p><p>Hermione forced herself not to shiver, brown eyes sharply fixed on Bellatrix as she raised her own glass. “To the Allied Nations!” She counter-proposed the toast.</p><p>Bellatrix laughed, sharp and screeching, and tossed herself back with her glass high in the air, and finished it in a single gulp. “We’re going to have <em> fun, </em> Mu--” She trailed off, shaking her head, and shot a look at Flyorov. “Too many bores around, I’m afraid. Delphini, go back upstairs. Mum’s got to talk about some stuff with these lovely people now.”</p><p>“... Am I gonna see you again, mum?” Delphini got up from where she had finished her meal, and quietly stepped over to her mother to give her a hug.</p><p>“Of <em> course </em> you are, sweetie. Mum’s just got to deal with some silly people who don’t respect her. She’ll be back soon.” She looked to Flyorov. “Tamar Dadiani’s husband will be taking you in, see? Vasily Flyorov. The nice old man over there who won’t let me call people mudbloods.”</p><p>Delphini’s eyes are wide. “Well, what else are you going to call a mudblood, mum?”</p><p>“Something else, I suppose…”</p><p>Flyorov, with a smile, got up to leave with Delphini, and then paused and looked to Bellatrix. “You have my word that I will protect your daughter to the last dying breath, Madame Black. She is five. She deserves none of this. She will be welcome at the Dadiani Manor for as long as she lives.”</p><p>Bellatrix fixed him with a look for a long silent moment, and then made an imperious gesture to command him to leave without speaking, using her gloved, newly artificial left hand, which she had otherwise held folded close to herself in a listless way through the whole breakfast. Flyorov chose to obey, and followed Delphini out. Once the door was closed, her gaze fixed on Tamar Dadiani instead.</p><p>For a moment, silence reigned over all of them. Bellatrix had a talent, or rather animal charisma, with her wild personality to control the tempo of a room. She reached, trembling, with her right hand to pluck a document out that she had stuffed into her corset, ignoring the rather impressive show the gesture gave to her guests as she retrieved it, and extended it, her arm still trembling, to Lady Tamar. “This is my Will. I <em> expect, </em> that it will be legally binding, to guarantee that my daughter, should I fail to return from this mission, will be raised by my lawfully born blood sister, Narcissa Malfoy née Black, with full rights of custody and parenting. Since you are the Actual State Councillor for Witchcraft of the Republic of Georgia, I expect you to file it appropriately.”</p><p>Lady Tamar took the parchment with a single, reserved nod. “I will give you the consideration, Madame Black. If you do not survive, for whatever reason, we will convey your daughter to your sister.”</p><p>Bellatrix gave her no answer. She clearly considered it a right, and she was clearly uncomfortable having contemplated failure at all. Hermione was surprised that she had, but it was clear that motherhood had changed the Death Eater.</p><p>General Diaz, who had been silent before, looked significantly at his watch, then. Bellatrix looked at her own left wrist, then paused, and sighed. She fished around in a hidden pocket in her skirt for her own chronometer, and strapped it on over her engageante; she was clearly unwilling to show any part of her arm to the world. “It’s time, isn’t it?”</p><p>“You do need to go,” her Chief of Staff agreed. “And we loaded everything you asked for into a convoy already.”</p><p>“Good. So we go to the Crimean, organise the coup de main there, and then kill Rookwood. Easy,” Bellatrix shrugged. “We should be going, then.”</p><p>Hermione tensed. “Kill.. Rookwood?”</p><p>“Of course. As I explained, though some of my old staff is there, the forces in the Crimean are not under my control. Rookwood is commanding the forces arrayed against Sevastopol,” Bellatrix answered. “Our first order of business when the fighting begins will be to kill him before he can organise opposition against us, and that’s precisely why I need you, because without some kind of prize I am carrying to the Dark Lord, he would be too suspicious about all of this.”</p><p>“Alright.” <em> Merlin, what the hell are our chances, anyway? </em> Hermione shivered, then closed her eyes. “I’ll meet you outside at the convoy, Madame Black. I want to say goodbye to my friends, alone.”</p><p>Bellatrix pushed herself up, reaching immediately afterwards for her left shoulder and rubbing it with a grimace on her face. “Sure, if that’s what you like. I need to find another pain potion anyway. And say goodbye to my daughter.” She glanced to General Diaz. “You know what to do. Move the troops into position quietly, operating under Lady Tamar’s direction, launch the attack when you receive the signal from me in the Crimean, and just keep attacking until you reach the Dnepr.”</p><p>“Of course, Madame.”</p><p>Hermione watched as Bellatrix stalked out, then General Diaz followed her. The door again closed, and she looked around… And reached out her hands to take Ginny and Nymphadora’s hands across the table. Larissa reached out to put a hand on her shoulder, and she smiled faintly.</p><p>After a moment, Lady Tamar and Colonel Kabanov also excused themselves and departed, to leave the four friends behind.</p><p>It was then that Hermione felt comfortable enough to speak. “Thank you all. I appreciate that you’ve remained my friends through all we’ve known. Dora, Ginny, please don’t quit until Britain is free from Voldemort. Ginny, please,” she swallowed, and forced herself to say it. “I want you to explain something to Ron, the next time that you see him.” She absolutely felt, with what was now a pressing sense of impending doom, that she could not leave these words unsaid.</p><p>“I’ll be happy to, Hermione, but you can do it yourself, too, you know. You <em> are </em> coming back to us. Just don’t trust Bellatrix and keep your wand ready, and if it all goes to hell, apparate to the Sevastopol garrison, they’re within range.”</p><p>“I’ll remember the advice,” Hermione said, and elected not to remind her friend that unless Bellatrix followed her—which was highly unlikely—that she’d die for failing to do her utmost to protect Bellatrix under the Unbreakable Vow. “So… This is what I want you to tell Ron: What he did in Chisinau made me uncomfortable, but there’s a bigger reason why we broke up, and it’s not his fault at all. I’m a lesbian, Ginny.”</p><p>“Oh… <em>Oh.</em> <em>Oh.” </em>Ginny smiled and laughed. “That doesn’t really surprise me actually. Does.. Nobody else is surprised either… You told Dora and Lara already didn’t you?”</p><p>“Yes, I was going tell you, I promise,” Hermione flushed, “But this whole stupid thing with Bellatrix switching sides got in the way before I could. So I just got overwhelmed, but I absolutely had to tell you before we reached a point where … I may not be able to. And Ron deserves to know, too. He does.”</p><p>“He does,” Ginny agreed, and started crying, wiping at her eyes. “<em>Merlin, </em> Hermione. I was worried. You know that, I didn’t want to think that Ron would ever do anything to drive you away. You’re like family to all of us who are left, and I never want that to change. Anyway, you and Ron, I admit, didn’t really seem to have any chemistry, and this makes sense for why. To be honest, I’m glad, I’m happy for you. How did you figure it out, anyway?”</p><p>Hermione buried her face in her hands. “I’ll tell you some other time. It was … Stupid. And I do have to go.”</p><p>“Alright, that’s fair.” Ginny paused. “I don’t want you to go. Even now. Even though I have to admit it seems like Bellatrix really wants to … Well, I won’t say a <em> good </em> parent, but she wants something with her daughter, so I don’t <em> think </em> she’s just going to leave her behind and go psychotic and kill you. <em> Merlin, </em> I hope so.”</p><p>“... I have to admit it,” Dora added, “I agree with Ginny. I thought Bellatrix had something sinister planned from the start, but after this, after what she <em> actually did, </em> I’m less certain about it. She’s still a fucking beast, though, Hermione. <em> Be careful. </em> Even if she wants the mission to succeed, she could still put you in enormous danger.”</p><p>“Yeah, I know. She’s Bellatrix. That hasn’t changed.” Hermione looked down. “Well, I’m going to do everything I can to make this mission a success, and I’m sure you’re going to do the same here. If it all comes together, we’re going to save a lot of people and we’re going to give Voldemort a big smash to the nose. That’s what’s worth it, and I don’t want you to ever think I’ve been forced into this. It’s the best chance I have to contribute to victory, and that’s what I want.”</p><p>“I know, Hermione,” Larissa nodded, and squeezed her shoulder. “And we won’t let you down, for our part of it. So we will push as hard as we possibly can, and we’ll make sure that we’re all around to meet you when we link up.” She reached out, grabbed the remainder of the pitcher of mimosas, and poured a small measure into each of their glasses, and then rose.</p><p>Hermione rose with other, and then the others, and all raised their glasses, too. She forced a grin to her face, and winked to Larissa. “Poyekhali!” She shouted, and then drained her glass, and caring nothing for the floor or the expensive crystal flown out for a Death Eater’s table from London, threw the glass to the floor.</p><p>They all echoed the toast, and littered their boots with fragments of crystal that glinted and glimmered in the light of the room. Hermione tossed a salute to Dora as her nominal superior, and the woman with perhaps a glint of a tear in her eye, returned it. And then Hermione turned away, and parted from her friends, and went to face the fear that was boiling in her gut. She was passing away from friends and comrades, and placing herself in the hands of Bellatrix Black, to go with her deep behind enemy lines, sworn to obey her command.</p><p>
  <em> God help me. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>They sat together in the same Land Rover, while the drivers of the convoy ran hard and fast up and over the Georgian Military Road and the Jvari Pass. Descending, and descending, through the massive snow-filled canyons, where wizards of the army worked to keep the roads open, and torrents of water still plunged through the streams and rivers, now building up Naled growing thicker and thicker around the road in the low spots, as they raced along with perilous speed toward Vladikavkaz.</p><p>They pushed along the roads until the Naled receded from the flanks of the tarmac, and the trees poked back through the snow, and finally until they reached the ruined buildings of the city of Vladikavkaz, which because of the circumstances, was filled with people, living in ruins and hovels, who did not yet realise that they had already been liberated, nor would they know it for several further days.</p><p>The whole while, Bellatrix was sitting across from her in the back of the Land Rover, slumped down to the far side, cradling her artificial arm in her good one, usually with her eyes closed, but occasionally opening them and looking at Hermione as a predator does to prey. For all that, the position was quite vulnerable, and it reminded Hermione of just how <em> small </em> of a woman Bellatrix was, shorter than her sisters and that actually, Bellatrix was at least five centimetres <em> shorter </em> than Hermione. That gave her no comfort. Bellatrix was so wickedly unpredictable and aggressive that she always seemed far more dangerous and in control of a situation than her size alone would ever suggest. Even now, Hermione felt like she was facing a cornered predator, who would be all the more dangerous for it.</p><p>That danger held another element in it. Those eyes refusing to turn away from her were a constant reminder of what she had felt in the past. Bellatrix, pressing down on her… Her voice, speaking evil words in a sickeningly desirable tone. Hermione shoved herself further into the far door of the car. <em> At least we’ll be in a train shortly and we’ll have more space, </em> she reassured herself, and, to distract herself from speculating on what that look really meant, she decided to ask an innocuous question. “How long will the train trip be?”</p><p>“There’s still a lot of damage to the lines; fourteen hours to get from here to Tuapse, I understand,” Bellatrix answered, without leaving her place, and her voice as unpredictably sultry and dangerous as when discussing weightier subjects. Or anything really.</p><p>“Overnight, then?” Hermione asked, feeling aimless.</p><p>“Yes. But don’t worry, I don’t need to chain you until we get to Tuapse.”</p><p>“Wonderful,” Hermione sarcastically answered, gritting her teeth. <em> Chained. Just like she was in Azkaban. </em></p><p>“Don’t worry about it, Muddy,” Bellatrix laughed, and her eyes gleamed. “I’ll be gentle.”</p><p>“I would <em> appreciate </em> it if you didn’t call me slurs anymore, Bellatrix,” Hermione snapped.</p><p>“...Is that so?” Bellatrix abruptly lunged away from the side, nearly throwing herself into Hermione except that the seatbelt restrained her. She reached out with her gloved left hand, so recently added to her body in replacement for the natural one just severed. Cool black leather cupped Hermione’s cheek as the young witch froze in place. “Maybe… Without a hundred thousand soldiers with guns and arms at your back… I can just as well do whatever I want, pet.”</p><p>It felt like an electric shock up her spine. <em> Fuck her</em>! But the connotations of the words just embarrassed herself in the moment, and anyway, she opened her mouth and no words came out to reply to Bellatrix. Still, she had not used ‘muddy’ again, or ‘mudblood’, she had used… Another word entirely.</p><p>And then, for better or worse, the Land Rover rolled to a stop at the temporary platform built next to the ruined train station, and the guards moved quickly to open the doors. In relief, Hermione quickly stepped out and stretched her legs, looking around the snow-covered ruins of the city. It had been wrecked before Bellatrix conquered it, but she had wrecked it again, and now, only a few months later, she had switched sides and her troops were going to liberate it. Vladikavkaz would be liberated by the same woman who had conquered it, within the same year. It wasn’t the first time that had happened in history. War was ridiculous.</p><p>Unlike Bellatrix, she had nothing. She was going to pretend to be a prisoner, after all. She had nothing with her name to it, as if she had been captured on the battlefield. She still had her wand, but by the time the train trip was over, she would have that confiscated by Bellatrix, too. Then she would be completely at the woman’s mercy.</p><p>“Come on, muddy!” Bellatrix waved to her from the steps up into the train.</p><p>Hermione grimaced and followed after. The private car was intended for luxurious travel, that much was clear from the moment they entered it. There was a sitting room, a dining room, a rather opulent bathroom, and a bedroom. And Hermione saw them all because Bellatrix kept leading them back until they were in the bedroom, where Bellatrix’s sparse belongings, two bags, waited for her, carried from the convoy.</p><p>Jolting over temporary relayings, the head-end power flickered to life and fully illuminated the room. Bellatrix walked from window to window, pulling down and securing the blinds. “Needless to say, you’ll sign your death warrant—and probably mine, too--if you open these once we leave this immediate area. Or if you head into the front of this car, or any other cars. Am I clear, pet?”</p><p>“You are,” Hermione acknowledged, leaning back against one of the walls. The space was certainly larger than the back of a Land Rover, but she remained in very close proximity to Bellatrix Black.</p><p>“You better not be suicidal,” Bellatrix said softly as she turned back to Hermione.</p><p>“Didn’t I have to believe the same about you?” Hermione answered uncomfortably. “To swear that oath like I did? Don’t I have to trust that at some level, Bellatrix Black is willing to force herself to be a functional human being for the sake of her daughter? Otherwise, how the hell could I possibly be standing in front of you right now? <em> Merlin, </em> it’s not even your fault… Fourteen years…”</p><p>“Don’t ever say that!” Bellatrix flung herself toward Hermione and barely stopped. “Don’t say it isn’t my fault. I made my own damned decisions in this, and it’s precisely that Voldemort enslaved us all that I broke with him now. Everything was my decision, the arm included! I’m here because I <em> want </em> to be, mudblood. And you’re damned well right that I am not going to kill myself. If I wanted to do that, I’d do it, I wouldn’t sit around and moan about it and pretend I cared about living. Now what do I need to do to make sure you’re not a dead weight while I’m fighting to come home to my daughter?”</p><p>Hermione, trembling, looked Bellatrix right in the eyes. “Stop. Calling. Me. Mud. Here. Where there’s nobody to force you. Where it <em> counts. </em> Make me feel like we’re a <em> team, </em> so we can fight for our lives together <em> like a team.</em>”</p><p>Bellatrix stared at her for a moment, and then, laughing, threw herself down on the bed. “Oh, oh, Pet. Deary. That…” Still laughing, she rolled over onto her stomach. “Suit yourself then, pet. Suit yourself. We’ll be … A team. And you, who they had the gall to call the brightest witch of her age as if you could ever be compared to me, you, you,” her eyes shot up to glare at Hermione, “You are going to do everything exactly like I tell you to, and we are going to get out of this alive. Is that clear?”</p><p>Hermione swallowed. “As crystal.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. The lavish breakfast is something an aristocrat of Edwardian Britain (1900 - 1914) might have eaten; as usual, the Wizards are behind the times, and of course, Death Eaters have food flown in, at great complexity and expense, even on the front.<br/>2. Perrier is a brand of sparkling mineral water, which is somewhat stereotypically aristocratic.<br/>3. The lyrics of the song about Nostradamus, which both Hermione and Bellatrix recognise, are from the song of the same name, "Nostradamus", by the English-Scottish singer-songwriter, Al Stewart. In particular the 13-minute long version at the Roxy incorporates "The World Goes to Riyadh", an unreleased song, as a bridge between the two halves of "Nostradamus". It is exactly the sort of thing that would have been played on pirate radio in the early 70s.<br/>4. "Westminster Abbey or Glorious Victory", i.e., Death or Victory, transposed to favour Death, was attributed to Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.<br/>5. Rookwood was the Death Eater who infiltrated the ministry during the first war.<br/>6. Dnepr is the main central river in the Ukraine, extending north into Byelorussia and Russia.<br/>7. Poyekhali is a toast roughly meaning "let's go" or "Let's do it".<br/>8. Naled is the Russian name for what is more commonly called in the West "Aufeis", the German term. It's created when ice formation blocks the normal upwelling of groundwater.<br/>9. Tuapse is a port city on the Black Sea Coast between Sochi and Novorossiysk.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0024"><h2>24. The Train</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Twenty-Four: The Train</p><p> </p><p>Floo networks, portkey stations, they got destroyed in war just like everything else. Once it might have been a matter of seconds for a Russian wizard or witch to go from Vladikavkaz to Tuapse, certainly only a few minutes at least. A sufficiently powerful wizard like Voldemort could have gone there directly from Georgia by apparation. However, it made sense in the circumstances to accept the train ride. There were long-range anti-air missile batteries in Abkhazia which could threaten an aircraft flying north of the spine of the Caucasus, and all the ways that even the likes of Bellatrix and Hermione could have travelled had been destroyed in the chaos of the war, either intentionally to deny them to the enemy, or as ‘collateral damage’.</p><p>Hermione had asked for a book, and Bellatrix first tossed her a railway timetable from the Russian Railways before the war that she found stuffed somewhere in the car. After a sarcastic exchange, Bellatrix had then given her a copy of a magical history of Iran, and Hermione had sat at the desk in the compartment, while Bellatrix lay sprawled out on the bed, reading a book of her own. Those few hours of companionable silence they had now experienced were rapidly turning into one of the weirdest experiences Hermione had known, simply because she was in a bedroom compartment on an executive coach, reading a history book, while two metres away, Bellatrix Black was splayed on a bed, occasionally rolling around or restlessly shifting position and reading through a book of her own, her boots kicked off haphazardly into one corner.</p><p>Every so often Bellatrix would make a request for water and for snacks. At first, the presence of the House Elf had shocked her, but Bellatrix had just fixed Hermione with a glare, and in retrospect it made sense that an aristocratic Death Eater would have a House Elf with her on campaign. ‘Mardy’ was the Elf’s name, and she went out and collected the water and some snacks for them, and later on went out and brought back a bubbling potion for Bellatrix from a mediwitch travelling in one of the other cars. Bellatrix took several of those, with Mardy fussing over her while she did.</p><p>The potions were, Hermione suspected, serving to mask the brutal effects of shock on Bellatrix’s body that she was doubtlessly still experiencing from the amputation, only twenty-four hours before. The way that Bellatrix refused to take the glove off of her left hand and curled herself around to hide her left arm from Hermione or anyone else, still made Hermione feel slightly guilty. Though the glove and the engageante completely concealed the artificial arm, it was obvious that Bellatrix had not yet accepted what had just happened to her. The woman was suffering, and Hermione hated to be reminded of it, up close and personal.</p><p>Nonetheless, there they were, just sitting in the same room, reading, the train rocking and the wheels clacking underneath them. No barbs, no insults, just both of them trying to find ways to stay distracted. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close. Hermione could stay perfectly still for hour after hour, just reading and sitting quietly in her chair. Bellatrix fidgeted all over the bed, moving her book around and rolling back and forth. But from the corner of her eye, Hermione could see that she was definitely reading it.</p><p><em> Of course she’s reading it. She was ‘the brightest witch of her age’, just like you were. She had to read to get there. </em> The history of magical practice in Iran was old, and enormously interwoven with mythology, and sincerely interesting. But the longer Hermione was alone with Bellatrix and the more Bellatrix fidgeted, the greater Hermione’s urge to speak with the other witch was.</p><p>Finally, she couldn’t resist. “Bellatrix?”</p><p>The book snapped shut and there was an exaggerated sigh from the bed. “Granger<em>, </em> we were doing <em> so well, </em> why did you have to spoil it?”</p><p>Hermione carefully closed her own. “I was wondering why you move around so much.”</p><p>“Oh, you were wondering why I move around so much,” Bellatrix tossed a hand in the air, her voice mocking the question, imitating Hermione's words. “Why would you even <em> care</em>, muddy?”</p><p>“I said..!” Hermione started to protest the slur, but Bellatrix cut her off.</p><p>“And I agreed, until you started to nose around and ask me why I happen to fidget. Despite the fact I was minding my own business! So let me tell you, muddy, precisely why I do: Because I <em> moved </em> when I was in Azkaban. As much as I could, as often as I could, move, move, walk, walk, pace pace, twitch twitch, fidget, shake my leg, whatever! The Dementors couldn’t take <em> moving </em> from me! I kept my muscles as fit as I could in that hell, and I distracted myself. By moving.” Her eyes bored in against Hermione, unblinking. “Everyone calls me mad, but maybe I actually pretty much fucking figured out how to cope!”</p><p>“Maybe you did,” Hermione acknowledged, carefully, her words as gentle as she could say them. Then she turned and looked directly at Bellatrix. “I know that you have a family who loves you, and when this is all over, personally, I am not going to feel wronged if you remain free. I can forgive. And I forgive you for torturing me, Bellatrix Black.”</p><p>“Why do you bother?” Bellatrix squeezed herself back up against the pillows at the back of the bed, a trenchant look directed at the younger witch.</p><p>“Because I want to,” Hermione answered, forcing her fear back with an iron sense of purpose, keeping her voice calm. “Because we might be dead in another day or two, or worse, and I’ve made my decision to have a clean slate between us.”</p><p>Bellatrix laughed, and leapt to her feet, swaying a bit in the moving train car, before she crossed the distance to Hermione. She leaned in close when she did, and then put the cool, crisp leather of the glove on her left hand against Hermione’s shoulder, and peered forward into her face from a distance of a few centimetres. “A clean slate?” She <em> laughed, </em> screeching, so close that Hermione lurched back in her chair. “Deary, why do you think I <em> care</em>? What maudlin sentimentalism <em> is this rot? </em>Muddy, I tortured you. That’s it. It’s that simple.”</p><p>Hermione felt frozen in place. This was very much the same Bellatrix who had tortured her those years before. Bellatrix was mad, and she could do whatever she wanted. She <em> would </em> do whatever she wanted, with no restraints at all… For a moment, Hermione very much felt like she was a teenager again, with this woman over her, the dagger out…</p><p>The younger witch cursed softly, because of course that made her remember the other part of what that had felt like. Her memory of the way Bellatrix's thighs, the sight of the woman above her, had made her feel.</p><p>“I heard that,” Bellatrix grinned at the curse, the hideous condition of her teeth making Hermione flinch. “What’s on Muddy’s mind?”</p><p>Hermione reached out and grabbed at Bellatrix’s right arm, her brown eyes flashing. “I said it’s a clean slate, and I meant it,” she said, her voice low, fighting the conflicting emotions within herself. “But let’s be clear. I’ll call you Bellatrix if I want to. You can't deny me that informality after you carved ‘mudblood’ in my arm.”</p><p>“Oh that’s pretty fresh, muddy!” Bellatrix laughed sharply, and lightly cuffed Hermione’s cheek with her artificial left hand as she pulled it away, to stand up and glare at her. “What’s next, ‘shall we go see a concert together’, or 'shall we go on a romantic walk by the lake together'?”</p><p>Hermione couldn’t help it, she flushed.</p><p>“Oh, oh,” Bellatrix pointed at her and smirked. “Now that’s interesting.” Wandering back over to the bed, she intentionally toppled back down on it, and this time raised her gloved left hand and pointed it again, as a now horrified Hermione felt herself turning bright cherry right. “Now that’s interesting,” Bellatrix repeated, shaking her finger at the younger witch. “That’s one hell of a blush.”</p><p>“I gotta say, muddy…” Bellatrix continued idly, shaking her head in bemusement, intentionally trailing off.</p><p>“How about you stop calling me that?!” Hermione exploded upwards to leap to her own feet while the train jolted beneath them. “Just like we agreed to! I want you to acknowledge that I’m a human being. You see, when you scrawled that name into my arm, the blood that came out was the same colour as your’s! You’re burning yourself up with hatred, and it’s all based on a lie! There’s no difference between us except for our ancestry. We’re both witches. In fact, if everything I’ve heard is true, both very smart ones, too.” She sank back to her chair, trembling, her cheeks still flushed.</p><p>“Maybe, <em> pet, </em> that hatred kept me warm in Azkaban,” Bellatrix spoke dully, her eyes hooded, as she sank back into the pillows with an exhausted sigh, her own body shaking, and yanked the comforter over herself.</p><p>“But you don’t need it now. I am going to <em> risk my life, </em> Bellatrix, for the moment when you get to give Narcissa a hug. The moment when you get to see Andromeda again, with no society there to condemn you, no Dark Lord to forbid you, no other Death Eaters to mock you. The moment when you get to see cute little Teddy Lupin running around and playing with the other kids in his flat. He’s nearly the same age as Delphini, and…”</p><p>“Why do you think I give a fuck about Andromeda?” Bellatrix shot back at her sharply.</p><p>“Madame Malfoy meets with her regularly now, she lives in Nizhniy Novgorod and takes care of Teddy for Tonks,” Hermione sat down, explaining, and then reached down to pull her boots off, her feet aching, trying to project an image of calm confidence as she looked at Bellatrix, keeping focused on her.</p><p>“...Cissy and Andy are meeting with each other?” For a moment, the surprise simply broke through Bellatrix’s shields. A rather blank and hooded look clouded her face, too complex for Hermione to easily interpret.</p><p>“Yeah, they are,” she said, brown eyes sincere, as she put the boots under the desk and smiled, shakily. “In Russian wizarding society, there’s nothing wrong with being a halfblood. Nothing wrong with keeping up your friendships with other purebloods who marry mudbloods, even. The Pureblood families…”</p><p>“Even married aristocratic muggles, as recently as three hundred years ago,” Bellatrix interjected, her eyes narrowing. “It was a disgrace. Why the hell were you visiting Andy?”</p><p>“Tonks—Dora--asked me to. And, you know, Ron and I were Harry’s best friends, and Harry was supposed to be Teddy’s godfather, so…” Her voice cracked, she couldn’t go on, she started to cry. In front of Bellatrix. In front of this Death Eater. The shame of crying like that just made her cry harder, though. “And my parents—god knows if they’re even alive in Australia, where I had to wipe their minds and send them to keep them safe from people like <em> you. </em> And you’ve got it all, Bellatrix! You’ve got your daughter, you’ve got your sisters, you’ve got your nephew, you’ve got your niece, you’ve got a grand-nephew. You’re going to walk away from the Crimean and they’re going to give you an Order of Victory just like they did to King Michael, and you’re going to have all of them in a Dacha, surrounding you, loving you, very, very far from Dementors. If I am lucky when this war is over, I’ll have Dora, Ginny, and Lara.”</p><p>Bellatrix snorted. “Don’t forget your boytoy. Who killed my husband, I might add. He’ll be getting a flashier Order of Victory than mine, and a chest full of medals that will be heavy enough to topple him over when he’s old and fat. Merlin, Weasels. I’m surprised you’re even here, the way they breed you should have had four kids by now. At least. Have you been taking birth control and not telling him? He’d probably leave you for that. I'd wager Weasels think it’s a sin or something.”</p><p>Hermione, cheeks hot with tears, was about to open her mouth to defend Ron when the other shoe dropped.</p><p>“Should I tell him that you get turned on by me?” Bellatrix continued cheerfully gabbing, a hand dramatically tossed in the air. “Would that make him disgusted or would it turn him on? Ugh, God, a Weasel being turned on. It makes me sick just to say that… I have to admit, I could believe you were something more than a mudslut if you hadn’t let him… Do it with you.” She made an exaggerated shaking motion, before pulling the covers tighter over herself.</p><p>Hermione flushed hard again, even with tears still drying on her cheeks. She felt almost like Bellatrix’s puppet at that point. A part of her had hoped the woman had forgotten about her previous blush, but, she hadn’t, and now they were here. “What did you just say?” It didn’t sound very convincing, even to her, though.</p><p>“It was pretty obvious just a little bit ago that you were getting very turned on by having me up close to you, pet," Bellatrix smirked.</p><p>The younger witch got up again, anger motivating her through her tears. “I’m not dating Ron. So you’re wrong about me being a ‘mudslut’,” she hissed. “So leave off, and again, don’t say it.”</p><p>“Well you hadn’t asked me not to say <em> that </em>word yet,” Bellatrix answered petulantly.</p><p>“That was pathetic,” Hermione shook her head. Forgotten was calm. She wanted to channel her own anger.  “Did you even care about your husband? Sleeping with Voldemort to have a child instead of him?”</p><p>Bellatrix shot her a look of her own. That <em>had </em>landed close to home for her. “I… No, of course I didn’t care about my husband, that’s the way Pureblood marriages are. Surely you know that.”</p><p>“Narcissa loved Lucius, as far as I can tell,” Hermione answered.</p><p>“Well perhaps my little kid sister was just a little bit of an idiot. Fortunately for all of us she fixed that when it counted.” Bellatrix shook her head. “Regardless, I don’t give a rat’s arse at my husband, then or now.”</p><p>“Fair. I won’t begrudge you your beliefs about others.”</p><p>“Good.” Bellatrix looked around in frustration. “Mardy, can you get the mediwitch to give me another one of those potions? Something with a sleeping draught in it, too, it’s getting late.”</p><p>“Yes, Mistress Bellatrix!” The elf popped away, and Hermione heard what seemed like relief in her voice, to be as far away as possible from the tense conversation between the two women.</p><p>“As it happens, by the way, my husband knew and approved of my relationship with Voldemort. It was an honour for me to bear the Dark Lord’s child, even at the expense of fidelity in our marriage,” Bellatrix continued, mustering some tattered remnant of haughtiness.</p><p>Hermione laughed, garnering a sharp, angry look from Bellatrix, but it didn’t dissuade her from speaking. Not about this. She’d put a lot of thought into it, long before this night. “That really gets me about all of you Death Eaters. You were all strong, capable, smart wizards and witches. Awful people, to be sure, but I mean, why the blind subservience? Fourteen years in a place worse than hell for you. And your husband got that fourteen years too, and then let himself gladly be cuckolded by the Dark Lord when he gets out?”</p><p>“My husband never controlled me enough to be able to say <em> no, </em> ” Bellatrix answered with a self-satisfied smirk. “And never let yourself think otherwise.”</p><p>“Good. So why did Voldemort control you?” Hermione’s brown eyes didn’t want to let Bellatrix go, they held her gaze, now, curiosity overcoming fear. “Brightest Witch of Your Age, and I certainly believe women are as good as men. Why didn’t you take over the world and kill all the mudbloods yourself? Why couldn’t you have done it, why did you have to destroy your life to serve him instead?”</p><p>Bellatrix flinched.</p><p>“Was it the sunk cost fallacy?” Hermione continued.</p><p>“Oh, <em> Merlin, </em> muggle rotter words,” Bellatrix sighed, recovering some of her composure and using that to dodge answering. The words had certainly impacted her, however. She reached out to tug at some greying hair on her head, and then distracted herself with Mardy’s return with the mug refilled with another bubbling potion.</p><p>Hermione, for her part, reached for a glass of water and gulped it down, before using a spell to clean her teeth, since she for rather obvious reasons hadn’t packed a toothbrush. <em> She’d mock you for using one instead of a spell, anyway, </em> a voice in the back of her head suggested nastily, as if being mocked by Bellatrix should, in fact, matter a great deal. It was clear both of them had exhausted their interest in fighting.</p><p>“So how are we going to do this sleeping thing?” Hermione asked afterwards, watching while Bellatrix continued to nurse the potion.</p><p>“There’s a bed, you sleep in it,” Bellatrix snarked.</p><p>“There’s only one.”</p><p>“And? It seems like you’d enjoy that, from everything I’ve seen tonight. ...Wouldn’t you, pet? I assure you, it’s very flattering that I can make you blush just like… Hah, that!” She shrieked excitedly and pointed to where, indeed, Hermione could feel the blush returning.</p><p>“Blushy-blushy deary…” Bellatrix singsonged, laughing. “So why wasn’t Ron worth it? Awful in bed? Sexist pig who just wanted to put babies in you? Both? Probably not both, Weasels have so many kids they must at least know how to get it on properly. Tell, tell, you have <em> got </em> to tell.”</p><p>“I thought the idea of Ron and I having sex was making you sick just a little bit ago?” Hermione shot back. The last thing on the planet she wanted to do was gab about Ron with Bellatrix as if the two of them were just a pair of girls critiquing one’s former lover. Ron deserved better than that.</p><p>“Oh, oh, it still does,” Bellatrix held her gloved left hand in a warding gesture. “Let me assure you, I don’t have the slightest interest in hearing anything at all about <em> that. </em> I was interested in why you broke up with him, pet.”</p><p><em> Why does she keep calling me that now? Oh Merlin… Fine! </em> “Easy. You’ve been baiting me with it for a while now. I’m a lesbian. I never really was all that hot for Ron. We had rotten chemistry, and it was because I fancy women, do you got it? ”</p><p>“I got it.” Bellatrix shook her head, chuckling. “My, my. Would’ve caused quite the scandal in the Wizarding World if one of their precious Golden Trio had turned out to be lesbian. They’re not very ‘up on things’, you know, a little bit behind the times. Britain, Muggles like yourself, oh yes, <em> that’s </em> fine, I’m not surprised at all you just blurt it out. But this would have been something new for the wizarding world. They want everyone paired up in nice, neat and tidy heterosexual couples.”</p><p>“Not everyone is part of arranged marriage pureblood culture, Bellatrix,” Hermione snapped. In truth, she was hiding the fact that if it wasn’t for Chisinau, if they had <em> won, </em> she probably would have gone for Ron anyway, taken a marriage for Respectability. If she wanted to enter politics, become the Minister someday… That’s how you did things. You zipped your feelings up as neat as a button, and married for appearances and image. The thought made her glum, as she tried to find something to answer to the elder witch’s comment. “Larissa is fine with having me as a friend despite my orientation,” she settled. “So are Ginny and Dora and I told both of them before I went on this mission. You don’t exactly seem the type to be upholding sexual morality yourself, so if you want to bait me with it, just can it. I’m very happy that you have Delphini and all, but you haven’t got a leg to stand on to criticise me for my own sexuality.”</p><p>“Maybe,” Bellatrix’s eyes glinted at her, “Maybe you in fact understand me like <em> shit, </em> Granger. If you seriously think that I <em> care </em> about whether or not you’re fucking other girls, you have a larger stick up your arse than I thought the first time I saw you. Really, I mean, you were awful back then. It <em>is </em>a surprise for me that you finally cut that giant Lion’s mane worth of hair off and got down to business as a soldier, and now, fessing up that you’re a dyke. I thought you were too much of an uptight prude to ever even dare <em> think </em> about something like that. So I do give you that! I do give you that!” Her words degenerated into laughter as she repeated them for emphasis.</p><p>“Well, you’re wrong, because I did, and I’m here, and I’m not going away.” Hermione squinted her eyes at Bellatrix, her voice growing soft. “I’ve learned a lot about myself, in these five years of war. Sure, I’m the girl whose arm you carved. But I’ve grown up, Bellatrix, and I’m not afraid of you—but I am willing to fight at your side.”</p><p>“And you are,” Bellatrix finished the last of the potion with a swig and put the mug on the tray to the right of the bed. Then she used her own wand to clean her teeth as well. “I mean, one can well argue that you don’t have the slightest choice about the fact that you’re fighting at my side, but you are fighting at my side. And you're getting turned on by me. It’s all nice and mature and I’m sure it makes you feel great about yourself.” her voice turned sultry and low. “Would you like to ramble on some more about how self-actualised you are, or are you in fact going to live up to your newfound maturity?”</p><p>Hermione sighed. “Fine. I do appreciate you making your effort. So, about the whole thing with finding a way to sleep? We kind of lost that in everything else we just talked about.”</p><p>“Oh right, that’s obvious. You take your clothes off and get into bed with me.” With this impish, devilish grin on her face, Bellatrix tossed the comforter off, just to dig herself deeper under the rest of the sheets and blankets and toss it back on again. Her eyes, alive with mirth and bemusement, didn’t blink or look away from Hermione’s face as the girl turned bright red again.</p><p>“Come on, just how much of a dyke are you? You keep blushing like a schoolgirl.”</p><p>“I…” <em> I am not going to admit to Bellatrix that I haven’t slept with another woman yet. Am. Not. </em> “I just want to go to bed,” Hermione finally spoke instead, realising that she sounded as whiny as Bellatrix usually did the moment she opened her mouth, and feeling more embarrassed about that, too.</p><p>“You misinterpret me,” Bellatrix answered smoothly. “Your clothes are <em> dirty. </em> I think you’ve been wearing them for two days now. I don’t want my bed dirty. Take your clothes off so you can <em> sleep </em> with me in my bed. Because I’m not sharing it with you out of the kindness of my heart, I’m sharing it with you because I want you to get a good night’s sleep … Mardy, bring my guest a sleeping draught, please!”</p><p>As the Elf acknowledged, Bellatrix watched Hermione try to hide a wretched sounding groan, and then give up and go to the side of the bed to disrobe.</p><p>“We could be in a fight for our lives, and the last thing I want,” Bellatrix continued smoothly, “is for you to be so tired you fuck it up and get me killed. Like you said, I have a family I want to go see when this is over.”</p><p>For the first time in the whole conversation, Hermione felt a little thrill of triumph and relief as she disrobed. While this was awkward and embarrassing in every way possible, Bellatrix had just admitted that she <em> did </em> care about and value her own family. Surely that, then, was a start that she could build from. <em> Build what? What are you even trying to do, Hermione? </em> She asked herself derisively, particularly with how she felt when, stripped down to her skivvies, she found herself under the covers next to Bellatrix Black in what was barely a double bed, rocking back and forth down the damaged tracks.</p><p>Yes, she really needed that sleeping draught to drift off, though as she did, she couldn’t help but noticing something important. Bellatrix had taken her own sleeping draught first, and drifted off before Hermione. That meant that Bellatrix had, in a real sense, left herself vulnerable to Hermione when she had gone to sleep, and the younger witch decided that, too, was something that she could count on for being positive.</p><p>Really, Bellatrix’s wild, impulsive confidence and reckless disregard for the social conventions that she had nominally fought as a Death Eater to uphold was <em> hot, </em> it was <em> sexy, </em> her brain was telling her as she drifted off. Profoundly unwelcome thoughts when sleeping in the same bed with the older woman, she still couldn’t actually bring herself to <em> not </em> have them. That just proved impossible.</p><p>The wheels of the train clacked beneath them, lulling her to sleep, carrying them on and over toward Tuapse. For the first time, she was falling asleep next to the first woman she had ever fantasized about. The last coherent thoughts in her mind were about how Bellatrix definitely didn’t want her like that, and about how she definitely didn’t really, actually want an unstable nutcase like that, either. The last incoherent thoughts, were of another kind, entirely.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>-- Yes, you really can get a private railcar with a bedroom like that.<br/>-- Movement, within the limits of the heavy manacles, would be one of the only activities not producing emotion, available to the tortured victims of Azkaban.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0025"><h2>25. Pontus Euxine</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Twenty-Five: The Pontus Euxine.</p><p> </p><p>The problem with sleeping in a bed on a train, Hermione discovered when she woke up, was that the train moved through the night. It jolted through points and repairs to damaged track, it turned, it ascended, it descended on its journey. All of this contributed to Bellatrix and Hermione ended up closer together when they woke up than when they started sleeping.</p><p>Pressed into one wall on top of each other, mostly. And the sleeping draughts had kept them from waking up and noticing it until then. Hermione froze, and tried to think of what to do. But she also couldn’t help look at Bellatrix up close and personal. The woman was fabulously beautiful, she had not seen her this close… Since that night in the Malfoy Manor. There were a few fresh lines, a few more grey hairs, but nothing more. She was still absolutely amazing, anyone half her age would still desire her.</p><p>Hermione’s body seemed very intent on reminding her of that. She started to roll away…</p><p>Too late. Bellatrix’s eyes were open, looking sharply at her. Then her left hand, still gloved, lanced out and grabbed firmly onto Hermione. “Where do you think you’re going, <em> pet</em>?”</p><p>“To get out of your way,” Hermione half slurred, shaking off the lingering effect of the sleeping draught. “We rolled over… The train … rocking.” The pain in her shoulder from where Bellatrix clenched at her was overwhelming, and radiated into her neck and chest in waves. “Let me go, Bellatrix?” She asked, looking back at the older woman. She <em>wanted </em>to explain that she was in pain, but she thought that might make Bellatrix <em>happy. </em></p><p>When her request got no answer, Hermione rolled back toward Bellatrix.</p><p>With her eyes widening in surprise, Bellatrix let go.</p><p>“Thank you,” Hermione said, taking a few deep breaths as she forced the words out. “I’m sorry I got close to you without asking, and I’m sorry I rolled away with asking.”</p><p>“I know it was an accident,” Bellatrix finally acknowledged, and hauled herself partway up in bed. Bellatrix, of course, had slept in her clothes when she had refused to let Hermione do the same. “Mardy, bring us breakfast and tea, please?”</p><p>“Yes, Mistress Bellatrix!”</p><p>Hermione had to admit, that by the standards of purebloods, Bellatrix was actually rather polite to her elves. That and her knowledge of some muggle music were complexities to Bellatrix’s character that Hermione felt like she was fixating on. <em> So you’re not as one-dimensional as anyone thought. </em></p><p>Bellatrix was still impossibly sexy, though. That hadn’t changed. If anything, that she was showing herself as something more than a Death Eater was desirable, too. Hermione finally rolled away and softly groaned.</p><p>“I didn’t see you get drunk last night, Granger,” Bellatrix remarked drolly.</p><p>“I’m a twenty-three year old woman,” Hermione answered, grumpy and impertinent. “I just woke up next to you, and as you had <em> so much fun </em> last night reminding me of, I’m attracted to you.”</p><p>Bellatrix smirked. “Are you saying I’m too old to get horny?”</p><p>“I, uh…” It seemed like Bellatrix <em> always </em> had a comeback. Hermione reached up, grabbed a pillow, and pulled it over her head.</p><p>Bellatrix tossed her head back and laughed. “My-my, you need to work on this, Granger.”</p><p>Hermione sighed and pulled herself up, just in time for the food to arrive. Whether or not it was going to stay hot didn’t matter, she absolutely wanted to get her clothes on before eating, particularly with Bellatrix in a teasing mood.</p><p>Of course, it was not much of a respite. The train was descending toward Tuapse and once she left the train, Hermione would be a ‘prisoner’. Finishing her food and tea, she took the opportunity to quickly wash her face, neck, shoulders, hands, and then get settled into her boots. It was about to become almost impossible to do, after all.</p><p>Bellatrix, for her part, finished her own meal, and likewise washed her face before splashing herself with rose-water. Then she ambled out into the front of the coach, and returned a few minutes later. Hermione had tried to read, but she had barely gotten through a page. Outside was a city in utter ruins. The oil transloading terminal had been hit with a nuclear weapon. The main city on the north bank of the river was intact, but the tracks went as far north as possible around the old yard on rough, temporary relayings—slow going. Finally, they descended to the north-side coal and freight docks in the harbour, which were intact. Hermione could not help but look outside, hear the steady click of the coach’s dosimeter, see the people living in the ruins of their city, scrambling for anything that would keep them alive, both devastated by nuclear war and then placed under Voldemort’s savage occupation. They were like scarecrows draped in rags.</p><p>The train came to a halt, and Hermione saw what Bellatrix was carrying. The elder witch had a deathless expression as she held the manacles, the chains, and then approached. She said nothing, as she personally snapped the manacles to Hermione’s wrists, and then looped and secured the chain to her waist, and then tightened them, so she could move her hands just enough to feed herself, but no more than that. Hermione’s wand was with Bellatrix’s on her belt.</p><p>With each motion, with each snap of a manacle, or tightening of a chain, Hermione shivered. Bellatrix was so close to her, and when securing the chain around her waist, she was nearly in Hermione’s lap. It would have been electrifying if not for the rest of the situation, and Hermione felt a wildly frustrating combination of arousal and fear surge through her.</p><p>Then, Bellatrix smiled thinly as she rose, and for a final act, clapped a collar of cold iron around Hermione’s neck. “Since magic comes anciently from the Fey, they say this makes it harder for a Witch to cast any wandless magic that she might have,” Bellatrix observed in idle amusement. Then she extended the leash. “Come with me, Pet.”</p><p>Hermione gasped as she was jerked up, and forced to stagger along behind Bellatrix, down and out of the train, to soldiers snickering and watching, to a few Wizards in the garrison there to meet Bellatrix, who laughed at the sight, or who looked with more perverse eyes. The flush was fixed on her. She had no desire for this, it wasn’t sexy in the least, but that wasn’t how some people would see it, looking at it.</p><p>She tried to keep herself calm, to let the flush of shame and embarrassment die away, to focus on other things. The sight in the harbour was certainly worrisome, for the fleet there was stronger than the intelligence estimates had provided. Voldemort’s forces had, it seemed, finished the big cruiser of the Project 1164 type <em> Atlant </em> which had been laying unfinished at the Nikolayaev Yard when the Ukraine had been overrun. With her was a group of four frigates of Project 1135 <em> Burevestnik </em> , also seized from the Ukrainian Navy, one of them new. They looked sinister with the Morsmordre hoisted above them, and Hermione knew that with the Russian Black Sea Fleet reduced to the three old cruisers of Project 1134B, the <em> Berkuts, </em> as well as a few missile boats, that soon if this operation did not succeed, their enemies would decisively cut off Sevastopol, and effect the destruction of the city and the garrison.</p><p><em> It’s like you chose this method of taking me to the Crimean to prove how critical your help is, </em> Hermione thought. Sometimes it was hard to tell just how much calculation was in the older Witch’s head. Only the cruiser was docked, and of course that was where they were headed. With the hills around coated in white, the rough darkness of the Black Sea—the Pontus Euxine of the Ancient Greeks—beckoned ahead. The wind was kicking up, and whomever they had for a port master had hoisted the gale warning.</p><p>With a smirk settled on her lips and Mardy apparating her bags aboard for her, Bellatrix ambled up the gangway, tugging Hermione aboard the cruiser as the young woman’s hopes faded further at the prospects of an unknown length of time chained up aboard a ship in a storm. She began to understand the degrading intensity of such a punishment, and it had only just begun.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Aboard the cruiser, which had been christened the <em> Gauntlet, </em> Bellatrix had insisted that she kept her prisoner nearby, which had led to her being given the Admiral’s suite, and Hermione being stuffed into the small room off of it where the Admiral’s flag lieutenant might normally sleep. The ship had not been carrying a flag officer, so it was empty, and she had nothing to do but curl onto the bed, with the weight of the chains pressing down onto the mattress.</p><p>When they cleared the breakwaters, the waves immediately came down, thundering against the ship’s clipper bow, and slowly sending spray to rise around the superstructure block she was in, obscuring her view of the outside world. Then, the spray would fall back to the decks, and she could look out at the sea, and the deep waves thrumming down her length as the cruiser worked up to speed. The cruiser was an enemy ship and Hermione was all alone on her.</p><p>Except, of course, for Bellatrix Black.</p><p>400 kilometres across the open sea. They were making about 40km/h despite the weather, Hermione estimated as best she could from the waves and the sea. In ten hours, they would be in a position to apparate to Rookwood’s headquarters in Yalta, they wouldn’t even need to wait for the ships to arrive in Kerch or Feodosia, if it worked out. That had been a last minute change to the plan by Bellatrix. They wouldn’t even need to be at sea overnight.</p><p>Of course, the sea could change quickly. Like a middle-class British girl would, she had taken ferries a few times with her family, a few tourist rides on old boats in harbours. She had crossed the Caspian by ferry only months before, what seemed like a lifetime away. But instead of past experiences at sea, her mind fixed on a song that sometimes came on the radio stations that her father listened to. It was by the Canadian singer, Gordon Lightfoot, about a shipwreck…</p><p>“<em>When afternoon came it was freezing rain, in the face of a hurricane west wind…” </em> She whispered some of the lyrics softly to herself.</p><p>The ship was slowing, the waves surging higher and higher over the deck. Outside, as the deck rose and fall, Hermione could see the stark grey sky, and the vast dark waves, one after the other, never a sight through the porthole that showed both, just one, and then the other. As the ship swung from one wave to another, though, she could briefly make out one of the smaller frigates, her bow plunging into the storm with the spray rising to her masthead height. The lesser ships were definitely struggling with the sea, as ice began to form on the railings outside the porthole from the seas, and the snow swirling down through the storm.</p><p>The chains weighed her down to the bed like an anchor on a ship. Her stomach roiled, but mercifully she didn’t vomit up the only meal she was likely to get that day. It was more the helplessness that hit her. The waves overtaking the ship boomed into the hull as she took them full-on, trying to keep making way against the storm and stay on schedule. Indeed, if they were delayed by the weather, the risk to the mission could only increase as the risk of whatever Bellatrix had done to disguise her daughter’s disappearance in Britain being found out would increase, and so would the risk of someone amongst the enemy realising that Bellatrix’s army had defected. Every <em> minute </em> they were late would cause risk.</p><p>She kept her eyes focused out the porthole to avoid suffering from disorientation and making herself sicker. As she did, Hermione could see lights flashing nearby, and then they were answered by the bright beams of signal-lights on the frigate. The frigate began to turn to the starboard, to the north, doubtless to seek shelter in Novorossiysk. And then the waves began to pummel the <em> Gauntlet </em> harder, for the scream of the gas turbines deep in the hull began to increase in force and noise, a subtle vibration rising in the hull. The waves met her with their full power, and she met the waves with her full power, the ship driving her knifelike clipper bow headlong into the waves. Now there were no other ships standing alongside, only nearly twelve thousand tonnes of a single cruiser challenging the winter storm. But Hermione grinned. She knew that somewhere up on the deck, Bellatrix had ordered the frigates to turn away to make up time. The woman was leaving nothing to be risked.</p><p>It faded quickly, though, that grin which flickered to life sputtered out when she thought of Bellatrix, and between the waves, and the confined quarters, and the chains, thought of herself in Bellatrix’s place in Azkaban. <em> Fourteen years… </em> That number came to her like some dark bane of her existence, reminding her of just how much the elder woman had suffered. The feeling made it hard for her to hate Bellatrix, and she was starting to wonder if she ever had.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Up on the starboard bridge wing, Bellatrix stood out in the open with her hair whipping behind her, slicked back by rain and snow. With one smaller coat under another heavier greatcoat, she was bundled up as heavily as anyone could convince her to be, and she held a handleless Navy mug in the Anglo-saxon style with a bubbling hot potion in it to keep her shock under control. The cold wind, conversely, drove back and numbed away her incipient headache.</p><p>It also meant that she was free before the sky when the waves pounded the ship, just like they had pounded the walls of Azkaban. She was on deck in the cold and the wet for just that reason, the only way to find peace in the storm was to remind herself as completely of her freedom as she could.</p><p>Out here, where the waves did not boom, but instead rose and fell with a steady, surging power over the deck—out here there was peace. Inside the hull, there would not be. Inside the superstructure, maybe only a little. It made her bones ache, though, this cold wind whipping at her borrowed coats. It reminded her how much of her life she had already wasted. The bones of old women ached, not those of young witches with the world at their fingertips.</p><p>Of course, one arm hurt for an entirely different reason, the reminder it was no longer connected to her body, and instead gold, cold gold that was perfectly functional but which leached the heat from the stump of her arm, was there in its stead. A particularly large wave tossed a douche of spray across her, and she shifted her legs, spread and braced against the storm, and finished the potion quickly, as it was now quenched from its former heat with a draught of seawater.</p><p>She had left Granger belowdecks, and stood up here for hours, letting herself get cold, save for the worried wizards of the <em> Gauntlet </em> ’s wizarding contingent, bringing her these potions she requested, thinking they were for the cold, and not for the arm she had completely concealed. Granger, her prisoner, one of the so-called ‘Golden Trio’, of course got nothing. The impertinent young Mudblood had a bed to lay on and a pillow to rest her head upon and blankets to keep her warm, and that was more than Bellatrix had gotten in Azkaban, where her pillow had been stone, and her bed, the bare floor, her blankets, old burlap sacks.</p><p>The storm filled her with energy, and though she was quiet and ached, she was happy to be in it. Peace in the tumult, that was it. The snow and rain lashing her face reminded her that she was alive, and that she was about to do one of those daring things that she could have done years ago, if only she had followed Voldemort.</p><p>The younger witch’s words cut, and cut sharply. Granger had been right. She could have been strong herself, and instead, she had squandered it. Now she was here on the bridge wing of a cruiser, in her fifties, not sure if she was truly fighting for herself or her daughter or both, with her only companion being the stubborn mudblood who apparently had lusted after her all those years before. <em> Mudslut. What else would get turned on by her own blood flowing to your dagger, while you held her in place? </em></p><p>Still, it required a kind of courage, which made her hesitate to keep baiting Granger about it. The woman <em> was </em> still a girl in some ways… And a woman in others, she had been made brave by this war they had all embarked on. There was something… In the confidence of how she insisted on forgiving, on how she overcame her fear each time to come closer. Bellatrix couldn’t exactly place it, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. The next few days would be brutal, but, still, she was sure that the mudblood would do her part.</p><p>Now <em> that </em> was a strange feeling. Bellatrix began to wonder if she shouldn’t check up on her, and make sure that she stayed fighting fit. With a shrug, she finally turned away from the wind and snow, and made her way belowdecks. There, the young witch was in her power. That held no pleasure but a gnawing feeling of concern, that she absolutely had to keep Hermione alive for the sake of the oath she had made. Ironically, too, she mused that Hermione, pathetic mudblood that she was, nonetheless appreciated Bellatrix for a reason other than pity or power. It was an interesting thought.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione watched from the bed as a bedraggled and wet Bellatrix stepped into her room, stripping off the outer layers of her coats and hanging them up, borrowed as they were, they could remain behind. Bellatrix looked sharply to her, and she looked up from the bed to meet the elder woman’s gaze. Her soul felt tired from the weight of the chains. <em> How did you survive fourteen years of this? How does anyone? </em> The human capacity for survival was amazing, and incredible. It was obvious that Bellatrix had, but in that moment of misery, Hermione could not see how she had done it. That Azkaban was deeply immoral and nobody deserved to be confined there, she now had no doubt.</p><p>She had also started to feel like she was very much going to die. She couldn’t help it, not with the storm around her, not with the impending steps into the wolf’s lair. In this moment she was far from her friends, and the whole world was against her. A thought had grown in her, seeing Bellatrix covered in spray, that she didn’t want to die without knowing another woman.</p><p>There, before her, stood the object of her desire, one hand white, one hand, black-gloved. Half human, and half monster. Half good and half evil? <em> If she pulls off this ‘strategic turn’, certainly. </em> Her mind felt whiplash at the prospect of Bellatrix Black, liberator of millions. “Bella,” she croaked, “this is really miserable.”</p><p>The woman fixed her eyes on Hermione <em> sharply. </em> “So we’ve gone from Bellatrix to Bella, now? What’s next? ‘Dearheart’?”</p><p>Hermione blushed. “Damnit, Bellatrix, I’m perfectly all right with the fact you’re not attracted to me. Can you stop teasing me about it when I may be dead hours from now?”</p><p>“I don’t intend to die,” Bellatrix snapped back. “So just play your part, the demoralised prisoner. I would say you did it fine when I arrived, except for ‘Bella’. Far too familiar. Perhaps you don’t <em> really </em> want Augustus Rookwood knowing that I make you horny.”</p><p>Hermione groaned. “Sorry.”</p><p>“That’s more like it,” Bellatrix smirked, and on the small desk by the bed, unfolded some food that she had wrapped in napkins, and then sat down in a chair. “Eat,” she commanded, simply.</p><p>Hermione dragged herself up, the chains clanking, and obeyed. “So what happens now.”</p><p>“We’re running behind, and that’s deadly,” Bellatrix replied. “I turned the frigates away, but we’re still losing time in this storm.”</p><p>Hermione, for that matter, wasn’t really sure how the swaying and pitching of the ship let her eat the food without getting sick, but she was starving, and had adapted enough that she somehow kept it down. “I was thankful you did that. I’m thankful you don’t want to leave anything to chance.”</p><p>“ Don’t you agree, from all of your reading, that sometimes not leaving anything to chance <em> really </em> means taking a calculated risk, even if it seems paradoxical?” Bellatrix looked down at her.</p><p>“...I can see the logic,” Hermione admitted, coughing as she digested her hastily eaten food.</p><p>“Good, because we need a calculated risk now. I’ve ordered the ship to divert to Feodosiya, but we won’t be aboard her for that. I think we’re close enough to apparate now.”</p><p>Hermione stiffened. “Think, in the Calculated Risk sense, you mean.”</p><p>“Yes,” the elder witch admitted. “We can’t afford delays.”</p><p>“Uhm, how far is it?” Hermione thought of the difficulty tables for apparating, published by MinKol, since of course they had done actual research on this.</p><p>“Two hundred and seventy-five kilometres,” Bellatrix shrugged. “I can do it. I <em> will </em> do it, even with myself and a … Guest.” There was a laugh of bemusement in her voice.</p><p><em> Fuck, she really is playing with me. </em> Hermione wondered if it was just for amusement, for kicks, or if possibly Bellatrix was trying to hide her own discomfort with the situation. There was a part of her that really hoped it was the later, that Bellatrix knew fear. Not for the feeling of triumph, but for the feeling of comfort that she was truly another human being.</p><p>Hermione pushed herself roughly to her feet, wanting to demonstrate that she was still capable on her own. Instead, she was surprised when Bellatrix reached out to steady her. “Yalta, I have it in my head,” Bellatrix murmured, showing her a photograph she had been looking at to memorise the destination. “Are you ready?”</p><p>“I’m ready.”</p><p>“Then I’ll let them know.” Bellatrix stepped away and left Hermione, for a moment, again alone. The younger witch bowed her head and let her body sway in time with the waves. <em> She could have laughed as I fell back on my ass, but she didn’t. </em></p><p>Then Bellatrix returned, and reached out. “Mardy will bring my bags, let’s go, we lack nothing.”</p><p><em> Trust Bellatrix’s magic over this distance… </em> Really, the answer was easy. Hermione extended her hand and took Bellatrix’s. “Ready.” She smiled bravely, before letting it fade, knowing that it would be impolitic to still be smiling when they arrived in Yalta.</p><p>And then, Bellatrix flung them across the waves of the Pontus Euxine, in a snap of magical power.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Once this city had been the home of the Conference which had decided the fate of Europe, with Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill settling affairs together. Now it was the headquarters of an Army in the service of an enemy more evil than even the Nazis they had collectively fought. The headquarters of Augustus Rookwood was in the lavish Hotel Taurica, which dated back to Tsarist times. And now, Hermione and Bellatrix were there as well, with a snap of power that carried them without hesitation the whole distance. Bellatrix, indeed, had a good estimation of her own strength. <em>The brightest witch of her age... </em></p><p>Hermione was greeted by guns pointed at her and Bellatrix, until the woman advanced and provided the counter-sign, tugging on Hermione’s leash. Again the flush returned, insistent that she would be humiliated by this. <em> The only ones humiliated will be those we destroy, </em> she thought to focus herself. Around her was the most beautiful city, almost a fair-tale of palaces and churches and resorts and manors of famous people, all of which had fallen into decay, all of which had fallen into the grips of this army to become its garrison. Like Chernosvyat, it had the air of a care-worn fairytale.</p><p><em> We? </em> Her mind was so cruel, sometimes. It ignored the city, and made her focus on something else entirely.</p><p>Rookwood, his beard having gone grey, was waiting for them in what had been a dining room, and was now converted to his central map room. Janissary officers moved around in a disciplined fashion, and the maps were updated with the siege. The storm raged outside, but inside it was warm and dry, the lights bright against the storm.</p><p>The want of the wind howling, or the damping of the snow falling, though, meant that Hermione could feel the ground shaking. That meant there was heavy artillery in action only thirty-eight kilometres away, at the outer siege lines of Sevastopol. She shivered, and knew what those soldiers on the other side of those lines endured.</p><p>“Madame Lestrange, welcome to Yalta,” he greeted her… His face twisting into a bemused smirk as he followed the leash back to Hermione. “I see you indeed have quite the prize for the Dark Lord. They called them the ‘Golden Trio’, didn’t they, before Our Lord finished Potter?”</p><p>“They did, and this is the second we have got. The Weasel is still at large, but we know he’s running operations in the European cities.”</p><p>“Oh, <em> that </em> bastard.” Augustus laughed. “Having fun with yourself, Madame Lestrange?”</p><p>“<em>Always,</em>” Bellatrix answered, with a glare. “My prize, not your’s, August. I want a room where I can keep a watch on her myself. I will deliver her to the Dark Lord as <em> my triumph </em> only.”</p><p>“Yes, yes, can’t trust even my dungeons,” Rookwood shook his head with an exaggerated sigh. He had always presented an image of calm normalcy, by Death Eater standards, it was why he had been selected for infiltration duties, and that he had retained the ability after his stint in Azkaban just proved that he was an exceptionally dangerous man, so that Hermione kept her head down and tried to avoid the slightest thought, move, or gesture that would make him suspicious of the situation.</p><p>“I just desire my just rewards, as I should support you in receiving your own, August.”</p><p>“Well, that’s one way of putting it,” he snorted. “I will summon a Concorde for you, but we’re in range of the S-400 batteries in Sevastopol, so you will have to travel to Feodosia to fly out. You might as well have waited aboard your ship instead of apparating so far.”</p><p>“Perhaps I <em> liked </em> the challenge,” Bellatrix laughed. “Is there anything else, or can I be taken to a room now, and leave you to your siege?”</p><p>“Well, yes, actually,” his face curved into a grin. “One indulgence, if you don’t mind – <em> Crucio!</em>”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes widened in shock and horror, and then white-hot pain tore through her. The last thought she had before the agony consumed her mind was how Rookwood had managed to look like a kindly grandfather while doing it, too. Then there was only fire in every nerve.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Probably the most confusing thing in this chapter is the nautical references and warships:</p><p>Project 1164 "Atlant" -- this is what is called a "Slava-class cruiser" in the West.<br/>Project 1135 "Burevestnik" -- "Krivak" class frigate. included in this number are several closely related projects, some with slightly different designations, but sharing the same hull form. They are called Krivak I, Krivak II, Krivak III and Krivak IV in the west.<br/>Project 1134B "Berkut" -- "Kara" class cruiser in the west. This is your author's personal favourite warship. </p><p>Likewise, the flash of light Hermione saw was a blinker light, which is a large aimed light on a pedestal which a sailor steers toward something he wishes to communicate with. Then you open and close metal shutters to conceal and reveal the light in a coded signal -- this cannot be intercepted by enemy signals intelligence. </p><p>As a bit of random trivia, the Hotel Taurica was the first hotel in the Russian Empire to have elevators.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0026"><h2>26. The Tempest</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Twenty-Six: The Tempest</p><p> </p><p>There were many experiences in life which one didn’t really need to have. Being tortured with the Cruciatus curse was certainly one of the highest on the list. It was not so much a feeling of a particular kind of torture, but rather as if the concept of torture, the very Platonic ideal of pain, had been inserted into one’s nerves and brain by magic. It was unfathomable, and very nearly indescribable, in the agony that it produced.</p><p>Hell itself, was that what this was? Alone in the Crimean, in the den of her enemies, Hermione was barely even aware that she had collapsed to the floor. The rush of agony coursed through her veins after the curse, and the only thing in Hermione’s mind was a fear of being hit with it again, a fear that vanished the moment she felt a warmth pressing close to her and around her from above.</p><p>“Rookwood, she’s MINE to bring to the Dark Lord! Mine! Mine! If you drive her to madness or kill her, we will have a duel! Damn it, I want her unblemished for Our Lord! She’s my prize, fairly won!”</p><p>The words were savage, but the press of Bellatrix’s body above her was comforting. The feeling of disassociation into agony rapidly faded with the closeness of the older woman. Hermione’s eyes blinked open, just to see her world completely obscured by Bellatrix more or less laying on top of her.</p><p>Augustus laughed. “Fine, whatever, Bellatrix. But I don’t think you’re worried about her being unblemished before the Dark Lord. You’ve had far too much fun torturing this mudblood, and you have since the moment you first got your hands on her. We all remember what got you betrothed to that boor Lestrange in the first place.”</p><p>Hermione could feel Bellatrix tense over her. “You wouldn’t dare…” Bellatrix pulled away from her, and literally jerked on the chain around Hermione’s neck, leaving her scrambling to rise as her breathing was constricted.</p><p>“You wouldn’t dare,” Bellatrix repeated, her expression baleful, glaring at Augustus.</p><p>“Have it your way, Bellatrix, but the Dark Lord, you know, one of Potter’s friends,” he chuckled, and looked at Hermione sharply. “You will be tortured until you are mad with the Cruciatus, and then as a mudblood, given to the executioners to be hung, drawn and quartered like the English traitors of old. I understand you fancied yourself an intellectual, so you will know what that is. Nonetheless, I assure you it was entertaining to meet you, mudblood. I don’t know what Bellatrix is doing with you, but I’m sure it will leave you ready for the kiss of Our Lord’s wand.”</p><p>Bellatrix opened her mouth to shout, but then, closed it, and spun around with a soft, angered scream, pulling on Hermione’s leash and forcing her, with her agonised, tortured muscles, to follow behind. Augustus Rookwood was laughing as they left, and Hermione desperately wish to know what had passed between them, even as she still felt the comfort which Bellatrix’s firm embrace had given her in that moment of agony.</p><p>Bellatrix then pulled her into one of the elevators, and the stares and jeers were mercifully over, it was just the two of them in the old elevator going up. There were no cameras or other devices to spy on them, since magic was used in this building, and so the electricity was kept to a minimum. Without even thinking about it, Hermione sagged against Bellatrix.</p><p>“<em>Don’t get fresh with me, Pet,</em> ” Bellatrix said in a low and warning voice, pushing her off.</p><p>“I—I’m sorry, Bellatrix, I just…”</p><p>“You wanted someone to hold you because you’d just been tortured with Cruciatus, I <em> get it, </em> I have been, too. The Dark Lord does it frequently to his subordinates who displease him. And there was nobody around to fucking hold me, so deal with it, Granger.”</p><p>Hermione hung her head. The kindness appeared and disappeared again in flashes, and she couldn’t figure out if it would last from one minute to the next. <em> Was I getting fresh with her? </em></p><p>But the elevator chimed, and with a jostle, Hermione was forced to follow Bellatrix to the luxurious suite which the elder witch had been given, with a collar tugging her onwards and reminding her regularly of its presence. Mardy was already there, setting out her things with Elfish efficiency, having crossed the storming Black Sea with the strange power of Elfish magic.</p><p>Bellatrix locked the door behind them, and then removed the leash from Hermione, but left the chains and collar in place. She looked exhausted, like she was bottling up inside of her a trembling rage. “I’ll have Mardy bring some food for you, though I can’t say how good it will be. You should try and lay down and get as much rest as you can. I need to meet with Dodson and Terrant immediately to get the plan moving. We don’t have much time, and once that Concorde lands in Feodosiya tomorrow, they will expect me to be there to fly immediately back to Voldemort. But it’s going to take us at least an extra day to get all of this operation planned, as fucked up and improvised as it will be here, and so the <em> first </em> thing I have to do is find an excuse to delay the plane on the ground for a day. The storm,” she glanced out the windows, the sun having more or less set and just a dim imprint of the rough seas and swirl of snow still visible, “will at least help with that.”</p><p>“It will,” Hermione agreed. Unlike before, there were multiple rooms, and she shuffled toward the smaller and less fancy one, curled in against herself. “Bellatrix, will you tell me what Augustus was … Baiting you with?”</p><p>“No, I won’t!” The dark haired woman shook her her still damp and tangled mane of hair with an imperious glare in her eyes. “It’s best to just not ask.”</p><p>“Thank you for being nice about it Bellatrix,” Hermione offered, with a small smile, and then let herself topple onto the bed.</p><p>“Mud—pet,” the woman actually corrected herself, “we are about to be in quite a fight for our lives. Get some rest.” With that, she turned for the bathroom to freshen herself up before going out.</p><p>Hermione watched her go before burying herself into the sheets and pillow. Sleep didn’t come easily, not after the Cruciatus curse. She still felt savaged and fragile. She wanted to know, so badly, what the exchange between Rookwood and Bellatrix had been about, but Bellatrix clearly wasn’t interested in talking about it.</p><p>So she dragged herself fitfully up to eat the food Mardy brought, and set out on the night-stand, for her. She tried to distract herself by imagining how she would tell people about what happened so far, and that worked for a little while. But it also made her think of the things that she wouldn’t want to share, like being dragged around on a leash by Bellatrix.</p><p>Next, she tried thinking about the layout of the Hotel Taurica, and how they would conduct their attacks the next day. That distracted her for a while as well, but in the end it would not suffice, either. Her mind agonised over everything. It especially agonised, most of all, over whether or not she had in fact been ‘getting fresh’ with Bellatrix Black.</p><p>The answer her mind kept coming up with was ‘yes’, and Hermione groaned in frustration, and perhaps a little bit of need, as she lay chained on another bed, trying to come up with some kind of justification of for how what she was feeling was wrong, and it wasn’t really what she was feeling. Of course, that justification eluded her, because it was what she was feeling. <em> Would once matter? You could be dead in two days, if she … Would she be interested? </em> Once the thought came, it would not escape. Hermione <em> wanted </em> Bellatrix. Still wanted her. Existence, the world and everything had come down to forty-eight hours, a prisoner in Yalta. She might as well try to live it.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix met James Dodson and Benjamarious Terrant in one of the few cafés still open in the City of Yalta. The two men being seen together would not be unusual, but Bellatrix being with them would be, so she met with Terrant first, and then with the cold night closing in but an address and a picture in hand, apparated directly into a private room in the back of the café while Terrant met with Dodson and went in regularly. Wizard, Janissary officer, and Witch were presented with a meal of Ukha soup, Vinegret with green peas, and Makarony po-flotski, made unusually with mutton, probably for the lack of anything else available.</p><p>The waitresses were virtually slaves to the occupation forces, but Terrant and Dodson both had a reputation for being kind, so the service was not lacklustre, though Bellatrix surprised them and her two co-conspirators with an order for a sizeable glass of Kvasya.</p><p>“Drinking tonight, Madame Black?” Terrant asked, his skin marking him as a descendant of one of the pureblood wizarding families of Britain whose origins were inside the Empire, and his easy confidence at Dodson’s side showing that he was not furiously haughty toward muggles.</p><p>“I’ll be sober by the morning, and you’re going to need it,” Bellatrix answered, and then, paused significantly for a moment before delivering the line which would make it clear what was happening. “My sister sent me a letter.”</p><p>Terrant’s face froze for a moment, and then he raised his wand, and tapped it toward the door, to keep the waitresses from coming back in. “Sorry, but we’ll have to go on without refills… Madame Black?”</p><p>“As you may have garnered by the message I sent from Lvov when I was flying back to my Command, I have decided it is time for a change in direction for Wizarding Europe, and Britain in particular,” Bellatrix smiled dangerously. “One that will serve your own intentions, and mine, and those of yourself, General Dodson, and the freedom of your troops and muggle Europe generally.”</p><p>Dodson’s smile froze on his face as he realised, dangerously, what he had gotten into. It didn’t matter if he was innocent, or he refused them, he would certainly be killed if anything went wrong at this point. In the classic old Chinese metaphor about the punishment for being late and the punishment for rebellion both being death, perhaps the harshness with which the Janissary Corps was governed had not been wise for Voldemort, but whether or not he cared or was even aware of it was an open question.</p><p>Dodson, however, certainly was. “You’re talking about a coup d’ é tat,” he said with a grimly breathless voice. “ You had better be committed, you know, Madame Black,” he said more informally. “You know the consequences if you are not.”</p><p>“I am <em> fully </em> committed,” Bellatrix answered with a hint of a sneer on her lips. “Calm yourself. This is not quite a coup d’état, but it is close to one. My entire front has gone over under my direction, and I have already secured pardons for all the Wizards and Janissaries who defect, you understand? Within a very short time, a massive offensive will be launched north from the Caucasus region with the objective of quickly seizing all territory south of the Volga and the Don.” She took a nice strong drink, suppressing her own fear. She wanted to see her daughter again, after all, and the most delicate time was about to begin.</p><p>“We won’t be going for the Dark Lord directly,” she did <em> not </em> say it was because she felt he could not be killed, since that would demoralise them, “but we will be inflicting the maximum harm. My objective is to put this Army on the Dnepr with my own Army crossing the Don, linking up with us, and pushing north to combine with the Russians around Kursk. We’ll have liberated forty million people or more by the time it’s done. We’ll be the heroes,” she added with another drink. “And my sister is in a position to make that stick.”</p><p>“If we do this,” Dodson answered, his eyes growing narrow and sharp, “we are going to have to move fast, and far, quickly. The Janissaries will have to obey without instruction. They need only obey though, a group of high-ranking officers can issue the orders, they will obey in ignorance, they will think it is a dispute between Death Eaters, not a revolt against the Dark Lord. We will have the CIS troops from Sevastopol helping us, quickly?”</p><p>“Yes, once we have control of the lines, they can move across them, they are already briefed,” Bellatrix answered with a shrug. She only barely picked at her food, as the drink brought a silent lucidity to her.</p><p>“What about the ensorcelled troops, Madame Black?” Tarrant asked. “They will fight to obey what the magic has placed in them. Rookwood is their designated commander.”</p><p>“I will take Rookwood with the Imperious curse, and force him to transfer command. Then we’ll have overwhelming weight of force on our side, since the ensorcelled troops will be obeying my directives.”</p><p>Tarrant nodded. “All right. That means you <em> absolutely have </em> to take Rookwood in the first minute. Can you?”</p><p>“That’s what my prisoner is for.” She looked across sharply at both of them. “Understand that this is the only way out for you. I need you both to move quickly, fast and hard, to put these preparations together. A Concorde is arriving at Feodosiya tomorrow for me, and I’m supposed to be on it.”</p><p>“We can’t execute this tomorrow!” Tarrant exclaimed, shocked. “Forty-eight hours would barely be enough time to put this operation together.”</p><p>“...We can delay them at least one night, I’ll arrange for ‘foreign object damage’ to the bird on landing,” Dodson offered, sounding more confident. “If the Ensorcelled troops are assumed to be on our side, Ben, this a lot more viable than you think. They can simply be ordered to obey Madame Black, and they will.”</p><p>Tarrant sighed, looked at Bellatrix, and then gave a single nod. “If it’s being organised by the Government in Exile, and it has to be for you to know about my talks with them,” he acknowledged the connection to Narcissa Malfoy, “then I really have no choice. Do or die, right?”</p><p>Bellatrix nodded. “Then we’ll meet another tomorrow. The sooner you gentlemen begin laying the pieces, the more we’ll have. But by the day after tomorrow, I’m going to have to just seize Rookwood and start the operation. I am running out of time and I cannot keep this house of cards together for much longer in terms of hiding my decision to defect. So I’m going to try even if you’re not ready, and I assure you, none of us will like the outcome then.” She finished her glass and put it down with a sharp clink.</p><p>“Understood.”</p><p>“Understood.”</p><p>Bellatrix rose, grabbing onto the back of the chair for support, and smiled a twisted grin. “Tell the men that whatever this exercise you’re planning is … That they’re going to have fun.” With that, she apparated away, to a quiet alley near the hotel.</p><p>Drunk, and happy for it, Bellatrix wandered back to the Hotel Taurica. Drunken Death Eaters returning to staff headquarters late at night was hardly an unusual occurrence for one of Voldemort’s armies, after all. Especially the ones who had spent fourteen years in Azkaban.</p><p>She wandered back into the hotel, the fear of the next two days bearing down on her like an oppressive, dark blanket. Death stood close at hand for both her and the impertinent mudblood who had volunteered to accompany her on this harrowing of hell. But she was a Death Eater, and she was supposed to love Death.</p><p>All of that seemed like a lie, now, when she just wanted her daughter, when she just wanted a life. Pausing inside the entrance, after the guards had acknowledged her with their salutes, she looked through the contents of old shelves, the old portraits gathering dust on the walls, while the dining suites were filled with tables, computers, screens, map tables and people who were busy twenty-four hours a day.</p><p>Impulsively, Bellatrix thought of how bored the mudblood would be. She felt it was rather pathetic, really, she had known boredom like nobody could fathom in Azkaban. But it was real. The girl liked to read, she would be less miserable the next day if she had some kind of stimulation. So Bellatrix grabbed a few old travel-guides which sat on the shelves, forgotten, for guests of the Hotel in an age which might as well have been antediluvian for all that had changed. Then she headed upstairs, making herself walk. She had reached the point where she was restless, and wanted the exercise, and was feeling better enough that the alcohol alone could quiet the pain where her left arm had been, instead of needing the constant draughts of potions.</p><p>Quietly entering the suite, she passed the entrance to the small bedroom, intended for the children of whatever couple might be leasing the suite, that now held the mudblood. Her hair was growing out from the sheer intensity of the recent events being too much for her to trim it, though it was still very short, barely an inch. It made Bellatrix remember the massive, frizzy mane which had marked her so long ago, and how much the mudblood had grown up. Her face was frozen in a bitter rictus of some dream, memory or nightmare in the current circumstances, but so far, so good, she had held up to the pressures of the role she had volunteered for her well, and her continuous impertinence and refusal to give up was impressing Bellatrix more than she’d care to admit.</p><p>So the elder witch carefully put the travel guides down on the night-stand to give her something to read, and then crept out to go to bed. There would be so much to do the next day, and at least she was free, and able to fight for her own survival. She did not envy Hermione Granger, waiting for her fate in chains. But the next night, there would be no going back: The chains would come off, and the dawn after that, they’d be in the fight of their lives. Together.</p><p>Odd thing to think about, that.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The next day, Hermione had woken up to find herself already alone, Bellatrix having gone out with the break of dawn. So she was alone, in her chains, waiting for the beginning of the fighting—or perhaps for Bellatrix to be found out, and for Rookwood’s goons to come to her in her helpless state, in chains, without a wand, and finish actually carrying her to Voldemort, to be tortured until she was driven mad, and then, exactly as he had calmly promised, hung, drawn, and quartered.</p><p>But somehow, in the middle of the night, the travel guides had shown up. And so, desperately lonely and lacking in any other kind of stimulation, Hermione curled up until she found a position in which the chains weren’t <em> really </em> bothering her, and started to read. With the pillow rolled up and stuffed under her head and the blankets drawn over her, she felt like she was really just taking a day off and relaxing.</p><p>As long as she had something to read, she managed to fake being calm. But the calmness was certainly a façade. She was going to die the next day, that was the thought that she could not escape, which all of the reading and efforts to be calm only temporarily held at bay, just to rush back in every unguarded moment. Mardy bringing food did nothing to help, and she spent the day in a kind of exquisite agony, trying to accept her own impending demise.</p><p><em> It would be nice if I had sex with another woman once before I died. </em> That thought <em> also </em> kept coming back, especially the way that she had felt the night before. A frustrated need filled her, and the only thin consolation that she had was that she would die at Bellatrix’s side— <em> when did that become a consolation!? </em></p><p>Her mind gave no answer, but it was true. She saw Bellatrix’s presence as a consolation. Her stupid infatuation with Bellatrix was probably the reason she had accepted this mission to begin with, and so, it would be the cause of her getting killed. She might as well embrace it, and indulge it, because there was no way out now, there was nobody to condemn her, there was nobody to question there. There was just the waiting, and then Bellatrix’s desperate fight to true her boast and give the Dnepr to Nazarbayev in exchange for her life. In less than twenty-four hours there was an excellent chance that she would be dead or worse, and she had simply run out of time to pretend her attraction to Bellatrix didn’t exist. She could only live with it.</p><p>Then, around nineteen hundred hours that night, the door opened. Hermione froze, not knowing who was there. Tense, and wondering, justly, if she would momentarily truly be in custody, or else dead, she waited to see.</p><p>The footfalls and the breath resolved themselves into Bellatrix Black, and Hermione’s sigh of relief was so loud it nearly became a groan.</p><p>“Are you quite all right, Granger?” Can a querying tone immediately. “I had hoped to keep you from working yourself up into a stupid funk with those books I found, I shall be irritated if it failed to work.”</p><p>“It did work, mostly. I’m just miserable instead of catatonic,” Hermione answered, and bubbled with hysterical laughter. “I don’t suppose you could call me Hermione?”</p><p>“Would it matter? Would it <em> help </em> make you less scared for tomorrow?”</p><p>“Yes, actually,” brown eyes flickered as she watched Bellatrix step closer in response to the answer.</p><p>“Oh, well, then, Hermione,” Bellatrix shrugged, and her words were a bit slurred, Hermione realised. She had been drinking, heavily. “If it will help you fight tomorrow, I’ll do anything for you.”</p><p>“So I get anything to make me fighting fit, but you get drunk off your ass?” Hermione bit back, feeling a bit perturbed or worried about Bellatrix’s likely performance.</p><p>“It will be <em> fine, </em> ” Bellatrix laughed, and sat down on the side of the bed, next to Hermione. She reached for the key on her belt. “I am not going to let myself be drunk in the battle of my life. I just needed something for the pain, and the fact that I am about to inflict the most spectacular betrayal that he has ever suffered unto My Lord. They will remember me next to Judas, if I fail, or even if I succeed and our side is ultimately defeated.”</p><p>“Isn’t that what you want?” Hermione asked. She felt even more nervous, with Bellatrix this close, she could feel her body responding to the other woman. She also knew that having her chains removed meant there was no going back, that the operation would be launched the very next day, because they had run out of time for more preparations.</p><p>“Half of me wants to prove that I can do this, sure, Hermione. The other half still hates me, hates myself, for betraying my Lord. He was everything I knew…”</p><p>Bellatrix’s face clouded over. “I spent fourteen years in Azkaban for him, and now I will betray him.”</p><p>“He left you in Azkaban for fourteen years, and showed you no thanks for it,” Hermione countered. “That is hardly loyalty.”</p><p>“He gave me Delphini,” Bellatrix shock back, but it was without venom in her voice. “That was his thanks.”</p><p>“A child you can’t raise on your own, a child he won’t be the father of? A loveless child? He’s not capable of love. Have you <em> ever </em> been loved?”</p><p>Bellatrix turned away like she had been slapped. “Oh come off of it, Granger. Of course I have.”</p><p>Hermione felt suddenly bold and reckless, and pushed on. “Was that what Rookwood was talking about?”</p><p>“It, Granger, that’s…” Bellatrix took a breath. “Yeah, muddy, it was. Her name was Thérèse de Lamar, and she was one of the brightest witches to ever study at Beauxbatons. We met during an exchange programme, where I spent one term at Beauxbatons and she spent one at Hogwarts. Both of us had figured out that you could tune in to muggle stations by fiddling with a Wizarding radio, so we’d sneak off or take advantage of our parents being gone to listen to the songs. I’d go out with Thérèse to clubs in Paris when I was at Beauxbatons, and she repaid me the favour and we would sneak into London to go to clubs, too, take a Floo route from Hogsmeade to Knockturn Alley and then go take the tube to concerts. My family found out and nearly disowned me, and I had to …” She trailed off, sharply, swallowing hard. “Well, that’s not important. Anyway, My Lord arranged my marriage to Lestrange to placate my family, so at that point, I owed him everything, since my parents thought I could never be married off after that scandal, but they forgave me when the Dark Lord gave me a respectable pureblood husband.”</p><p>“Oh… Oh.” Suddenly it came together in a flash. There <em> was </em> something between them. “What happened to Thérèse?”</p><p>“Rod killed her during the first war to make sure I had no taint as his wife.” A savage look crossed her face. “It backfired. I never slept with him again.”</p><p>“Was there… Anyone else?” Hermione asked, wondering, at what was, finally, an unguarded moment from Bellatrix.</p><p>“When we were both being held in the women’s cells awaiting trial after the end of the First War, Alekto and I,” Bellatrix admitted. “But then that damned bitch copped a plea by denying Our Lord and got let off.” With a sigh, she turned to look down at Hermione. “Come on, Granger. Roll over, I’m going to get these chains off and give you your wand. One way or another, you’re going to die on your feet now, right? If it’s tomorrow or in the future, you’ve got that now. Tomorrow, we’re going to do this, one way or another. There’s no going back.”</p><p>“All right.” Hermione obliged her, but her body was feeling an intense need for Bellatrix, now that she knew that Bellatrix was actually interested in women. The act of those gloved hands descending to remove first the collar, and then the chains and manacles, which already in a few days had made her wrists sore—she couldn’t imagine how Bellatrix had worn them for fourteen years—brought shivers to her.</p><p>So she couldn’t resist it. She had been through Cruciatus, the storm, she was probably about to die. As Bellatrix leaned down over her and released her, Hermione craned her head, and planted a kiss directly on Bellatrix’s lips. Bellatrix froze in shock, as her lips lingered pressed together with Hermione’s for a moment, before the young woman withdrew to fall back on the bed. “Unlike Alekto, I’m going to either win or die at your side tomorrow, Bellatrix. Was that fresh enough for you? We’ll be dead tomorrow. I don’t want to die without you.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked down, the drunkenness obvious, but now, something else in her eyes, too. There was a moment of silence, and then Bellatrix slapped Hermione across the cheek. “That was for kissing me without permission,” she snarled, but the sound was weak, and seemed to die halfway in her throat.</p><p>“We’re probably going to die tomorrow and you want your last memory of another woman to be someone who betrayed you?” Hermione asked, desperately. “I don’t want to die never having slept with another woman, Bella. Please. It’s just… I want <em> you. </em> I’ve wanted you since the moment you held me down with your thighs. Do you realise how sexy you are, what you can do to me?”</p><p>“I wasn’t done, muddy,” Bellatrix answered, and tossed herself down roughly atop of Hermione, her tongue insistent as she sharply and passionately kissed Hermione, spreading her lips, even if the taste of alcohol on her tongue was overwhelming, the unrestrained, uninhibited nature of it drove Hermione wild.</p><p>“That is for being such a damned minx,” the elder witch added smoothly as she pulled back. “But if you think I’m going to go for a roll in the mud…”</p><p>Hermione, having been freed, was able to reach up, and pull her back down into another kiss. “Why the hell <em> not</em>? Am I any less woman to you? If you lose tomorrow, nobody will care. If you win tomorrow—nobody will care. Fuck me.”</p><p>For all that, Hermione was still shocked when Bellatrix roughly and quickly started to pull her tattered uniform blouse and undershirt off over her head. She obligingly shifted her arms to let it happen, as her body surged with need at the realisation that this might, in fact, actually be happening to her.</p><p>It very much felt like something that was actually happening <em> to </em> her. Bellatrix, though smaller, was absolutely in control. She laid a line of kisses along Hermione’s shoulders and neck as she freed her of her blouse and undershirt, and along the upper edge of the sports bra that she wore below them, before pushing that up as well. Bellatrix was like a storm, moving insistently and fast, and giving Hermione no opportunity to respond or have any input on what happened. It would be a ravishing, had not consent and desire been so clearly communicated between them.</p><p>It was when one of Bellatrix’s gloved hands grabbed her left breast and gently rolled it, the crisp black leather pressing down on her skin, that Hermione moaned for the first time, as Bella left thumb-prints across her breast before Hermione gasped at the shorter witch’s lips finding her right nipple. Hermione squirmed in a mixture of need and lust, and spread her legs, knees flexed in the air. Bella took it as an invitation, and descended further down her young lover’s body, gloved hands curling around her panties and uniform trousers in a single motion to yank them both off.</p><p>For a moment, Hermione was embarrassed that she had spent two days without a bath, but the embarrassment was again replaced with pleasure as Bella revealed she had no compunctions about the matter herself. Instead, she descended between Hermione’s legs and placed a kiss on her hood, right above her most sensitive flesh. “Just a promise for later, pet,” she murmured, and then withdrew, pulling herself up, leaving Hermione to sharply inhale in the wake of her kiss .</p><p>Hermione blinked her eyes open to look at the sudden withdrawal of her partner , just to hear boots being kicked haphazardly off and, with a giggle of amusement, a pair of panties and then Bella’s petticoats hitting her in the face and blinding her again. <em> She wears petticoats? </em> Hermione thought dumbly.</p><p>Bella, her dress flared and hitched and revealing her to now be wearing only stockings below it from the waist down, didn’t bother with attempting to remove her corset or dress , nor did it seem to occur to her to remove the engageantes from her arms, but she was clearly putting in some forethought, for when she returned, she only had a glove on her left hand.</p><p><em> Her artificial arm. Her scars. She’s too sensitive about them to show them even now, </em> Hermione thought with sympathy, and then lost her breath again as Bella’s lips returned to one of her breasts, and the other one was claimed by her hands, with Hermione never being able to tell which hand would be where, if it was a gloved hand cupping her breast or playing with her nipple, or a bare one, the contrast in texture adding to her arousal.</p><p>Then, Bella began to kiss her way up Hermione’s décolletage until she planted a firm kiss on Hermione’s neck that turned into a soft bite that sent electric sparks flying through her body and mind. <em> Oh God… </em> Any vocalisation, though, was buried in the kiss that Bella gave her, now long and lingering, open mouthed, with Hermione, finally able to use her tongue to join in, eagerly entwining with the older woman.</p><p>Then, again, Hermione felt the dark witch pull away, leaving her exposed to the cool air of the room, her nipples pricking up in response to it. The only stitch of fabric left on her body was her socks, which Bella in her haste had not bothered to strip from her.</p><p>Before the thought of how silly that was could make her laugh, though, Bella was moving again, pushing aside the petticoats and panties she had so carelessly tossed on Hermione. And then, Hermione saw her legs, the legs that had been the start of this passion those years ago, descend around her head, still clad in stockings. Partially clothed, her dress draped down around and over Hermione’s face and head like a tent, engulfing her, denying any light to see…</p><p>As Bellatrix lowered her sex onto Hermione’s face. “Come on, pet, you said you wanted this,” she whispered in husky need of her own. “So here’s your chance.” And then Bellatrix lay down atop of her, her hands, one still gloved, forcibly spreading Hermione’s legs apart, knees up, as she laid down, still mostly clothed, atop her. The dragon-skin armoured corset pressed so firmly into Hermione that she shivered, sharply, but then those lips returned to where they had been before, with Bellatrix planting a firm kiss on the hood of her clit.</p><p>Hermione lifted her head up until her lips were in contact with Bellatrix’s lower lips, and tentatively reached out with her tongue to lick, and then stroke, completely cut off in the darkness, her senses dominated by the sensation of her tongue, lips and nose pressed up to Bellatrix, of Bellatrix’s scent surrounding and permeating all the air she breathed.</p><p>Bella held back upon her, occasionally planting another kiss to her softest flesh which soared like an electric shock through Hermione’s nerves, but also teased her, withholding pleasure until Hermione, herself, by blind trial and error, found Bella’s clit and planted a long stroke of her tongue up across it.</p><p>The <em> absolutely wanton </em> moan from the elder woman might well have been reward enough for the entire night. But Bella clearly felt that Hermione had paid her dues, since her lips locked right around Hermione’s clit, then, and her tongue descended to playfully and lightly lash at her.</p><p>Hermione felt her back arch, and moaned with her lips pressed up against Bella’s skin. This seemed only to amuse and encourage her lover; and Hermione felt a gasp of cool shock when the dark witch shoved a finger into her wetness. But it was a finger from her left hand, a <em> gloved </em> finger, her index finger. Bella pressed and then curled with it, to create pressure to match her tongue. It was <em> indescribable. </em></p><p>She tried to reciprocate as best as she could, licking and kissing and aiming for the elder woman’s clit, with those hips bucking above her as Hermione felt like she could barely breathe between Bella’s thighs and her dress, but she didn’t care in the slightest.</p><p>And Bella didn’t stop. With that finger curling and applying pressure from below as the wet leather pushed gently but firmly in a rolling motion on her skin from inside of her, and Bella’s tongue pushed down firmly on her clit while her lips sometimes moved together to add a firm pressure to her base and catch her clit in the folds of her skin, Hermione could barely track the pleasure she was in. She tried her hardest to reciprocate the experience, but she couldn’t keep up with the elder witch, who at least had some real experience with other women.</p><p>Hermione had no jealousy for that, only thanks it the incredible experience it had given her. She surrendered herself totally to the combined ministrations of Bella’s tongue and gloved, metallic finger, and between the two, she came, she orgasmed with a jerk of her hips like she never had before, her moans muffled into the skin of her lover.</p><p>Bella’s tongue lashed her clit and refused to give her up, making her ride the orgasm for what seemed like an impossibly long time until it at last was permitted to fall away. Only then did the leather-clad finger withdraw from her and a gentle kiss on her hood marked the moment when Bella pulled back, and slowly climbed off of Hermione.</p><p>“Oh, I’m so, thank you, I’m so sorry I didn’t make you orgasm,” Hermione was babbling.</p><p>“Shh,” that sultry sharp voice came back, as Bella spun around and planted herself on the bed with her legs spread. “Come here and fix it.”</p><p>Hermione eagerly crawled down to the bottom of the bed and then came up, between Bella’s spread legs and hiked skirt, and took another heady breath of her scent. She had always been a good study, and now she applied herself to learn, just like she would with anything else, even if the thought was mildly ridiculous and sexy all at once.</p><p>“Now, come up from below with your tongue, and be <em> firm, </em> I like it that way, I need <em> lots </em> of pressure, that’s who I am,” Bella instructed gently, and her instructions soon vanished into sharp, quick breaths, as Hermione obeyed and pressed her tongue up to Bella’s clit from below, firm, rubbing strokes against the elder witch’s most sensitive flesh in turn. She felt Bella loop her legs around her arms, dragging her closer with her feet, pushing Hermione against herself until her lips were so firmly pressed against the dark witch that it seemed it must be painful.</p><p>But Bella’s standards of sensitivity and pain were just different, with all the experiences in her life. She needed the pressure, she craved it, and Hermione firmly and roughly stroked at her with her tongue again and again, while her hands rubbed in loving wonder across the eldest Black’s thighs, which seemed especially sensitive to her.</p><p>Soon, with a tensing of her hips, the body of the older woman below her becoming taut in a way she could feel through her ministrations, Hermione tried to lick faster, while keeping her tongue as firm as she could. She was rewarded with a sharp gasp, an explosive release of air, and a muttered oath on the older woman’s breath as those hips were sharply shoved into Hermione’s face, and Hermione hung on for her dear life, keeping her tongue there to pleasure Bella with the pressure against her clit for as long as she could.</p><p>The need of all those years before had finally been satiated, and tomorrow and whatever it brought could go hang. In that moment, Hermione <em> lived. </em> She had followed her heart, and banished her regrets.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0027"><h2>27. The Barrel of the Gun</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Barrel of the Gun.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>All Power Grows out of the Barrel of the Gun.”</em></p><p>– <em>Mao Zedong, </em> Chairman, CCP.</p><p> </p><p>When Hermione woke up the next morning, she realised that Bellatrix was still with her. The elder witch was curled up against her in the small bed, with the smallest hint of a cute snore which hadn’t served to wake her up. Still partially clothed, she was pulled under the covers with Hermione, and though their backs were to each other, they were also touching, pushed up against each other.</p><p>Hermione felt that was the most romantic thing she had ever known. There was a tender level of trust in it that she had not expected from… <em> You fucked Bellatrix Black last night. </em> No, Hermione had definitely remembered that, but it wasn’t until then that the reason, the consequences, all of it came rushing back. Including an imminent fight for their lives. Somehow, with her back snuggled up against Bella’s, she had slept peacefully through the entire night despite how likely her impending demise was.</p><p>Considering she only had Ron to compare with Bellatrix, it wasn’t really a contest: Last night had been the best sex in her life. The fooling around with Ron didn’t even count by comparison. She didn’t want to get up, but then the alarm on Bellatrix’s chronometer began to chime.</p><p>The other woman rolled over sharply, and that absolutely perfect moment of peace and calm after waking up was lost. Hermione rolled over to look at Bella. She caught the witch’s eyes as she was trying to pull on her panties awkwardly, and for a moment, a shocked expression of surprise crossed her face. Bellatrix Black had very much <em> not </em> reconciled herself to what had happened the night before.</p><p>Then the moment of honest shock vanished, and one could visibly see her face go dark as she pulled her emotions back inside. “Go make tea, Granger,” Bella ordered, and tried to finish pulling her panties up while keeping her dress down far enough to remain decent. It was a little silly, and made worse by the fact that Hermione, as she got up, was completely naked except for her socks, which she had forgotten to take off before drifting off to sleep.</p><p>Then Mardy appeared. “Mardy has brought tea, Mistress, you don’t need your…”</p><p>“MARDY!” Bellatrix exclaimed, as if she had just remembered something.</p><p>The Elf’s eyes widened.</p><p>“Sorry, just, go,” Bellatrix sighed.</p><p>The Elf immediately disapparated away, leaving the tray with pastries, tea and milk behind. Hermione was left so confused by the exchange that … <em> Oh wait, I’m naked. Bellatrix was nice to her elf? </em> “Bella…”</p><p>“Bellatrix,” the dark witch snapped, reserved, but also sounding uneasy.</p><p>“Bellatrix,” Hermione hastily amended. “You didn’t need her to leave…”</p><p>“Oh yes I did. Mardy isn’t my Elf, she’s my <em> sister’s </em> Elf,” Bellatrix explained with a glare, though her eyes kept wandering back to Hermione, and she couldn’t really hide it. “Did… Could you … Cover up?”</p><p>“Ah-alright,” Hermione grinned and blushed at the same time, and started hastily dressing, which gave Bellatrix a chance to get her petticoats on with Hermione only really able to watch out of the corner of her eye. Whenever Bella looked her way, Hermione got a glare for it, but she didn’t say a word.</p><p>Having dressed herself in a rather more awkward way than Hermione’s practical military uniform allowed for , the two women sat together in the main room of the suite with the tea. There was a real tension in the air between them, for all that Hermione felt a thousand times better than she had beforehand.</p><p>And yet, despite that tension, Bella quietly reached out to the table and put the younger witch’s wand on it. Hermione had been taking a gulp of her tea, and even as she felt the wonderful surge of hot tea down her throat, her eyes widened in relief and thanks at having her wand back. The awkwardness and tension of the moment vanished.</p><p>“You shouldn’t be unarmed anymore,” Bella said, sounding almost courteous, and taking her cup, rose to walk into the larger bedroom, leaving Hermione behind.</p><p>“Bellatrix, thank you!” Hermione called after her eagerly , but she got no reply. <em> It’s a lot for her to digest, </em> she decided, and settling her wand back in the holster, eagerly guzzled her tea and ate a few pastries. They might be the last meal she’d ever have, and it was a better last meal than many others might have been over the past few years. Relaxed, calm, eager, she was ready for this fight.</p><p>A few minutes later, Bellatrix went to the bathroom, washing her face and spraying rose-water on herself, before leaving it for Hermione. They had almost run out of peace, and war was again calling.</p><p>“Alright,” Bellatrix began, her face inscrutable, all business, any hint of recognition of what had passed between them now gone. “Here is what I need you to do, Granger. Listen <em> carefully.</em>”</p><p>To be honest, the entire morning had been as surreal and awkward as hell, but Hermione fixed her attention on Bellatrix and got herself ready. She wouldn’t have a second chance. If either one of them died, the Vow would likely make both perish. They were committed.</p><p>And when Bellatrix told Hermione what she wanted her to do, Hermione blanched and still almost refused. But she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, not after that night, not now, when victory was actually close enough to taste. So, with a sense of foreboding, Hermione agreed.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>For a moment, when the two women walked together down the emergency stairs and came out into the lobby of the Hotel Taurica, it didn’t seem like anything was particularly wrong. Nobody was looking too closely at the woman walking with Bellatrix, and she walked a half step behind Bellatrix, exactly like a junior officer was supposed to. The front was more than three dozen klicks away, after all.</p><p>The fact that she was in the black with red pinstripes on the trousers of a Janissary officer’s uniform thanks to a rather complicated spell for transfigurating clothes which Bellatrix had executed a few minutes before was, of course, the final component of the arrangement. The fact that Hermione, if she raised her wand, would technically be committing a war crime, did not rest easily on her. Still, it was necessary for success, and Bellatrix had taught her the de-transfiguration spell. The Wizards in the lobby would have known if it was a Witch they didn’t recognise. They didn’t care a damn about a muggle assigned as an aide to Bellatrix Black.</p><p>“Alright, L’tenant,” Bellatrix paused, saying the rank like a 19<sup>th </sup> century Brit would. “Carry on, I’ll be meeting with Rookwood alone.”</p><p>“May You Live Forever,” Hermione saluted Bellatrix formally, and then turned and walked out the doors of the hotel, while behind her, Bellatrix turned and headed into the ballroom turned into command post.</p><p>The storm was over and the sun was coming up. Hermione was <em> free, </em> she was back in the fight. And when this day was over, they’d either be dead or they’d have made history. In five years, Hermione hadn’t felt like this. For the first time in all of this terrible broken-backed war, and especially after the disastrous outcome of the Southeastern Operation which had led to her dramatic break with Ron in Chisinau, she had not had any really confidence in victory. Today, she would either die or get that back. Since losing most of his Horcruxes, it would be the worst blow that Voldemort had known.</p><p>Of course, Bellatrix had assigned her to be the diversion. And of course, the diversion had to be as dramatic and expansive as possible. Over the night, Dodson had shifted loyal troops into positions further away from the barracks where the Wizards in Rookwood’s Army stayed. Conversely, Tarrant had shifted loyal Wizards away to front assignments. So the barracks, up to the north from the centre of the city, was the target.</p><p>It still involved a lot of collateral damage, and the thought of what she was about to do made her queasy. It involved a <em> lot </em> of collateral damage, and there was no way to warn the civilians. She fished around in her pocket for the map to orient herself, as she tried to think of a way of doing it without harming innocent people.</p><p>“Hey, what’s up mate?” Another Janissary officer called to her.</p><p><em> Damn, I’ve been standing here to long. </em> Her dislike for what Bellatrix had asked her to do was getting to her. Of course, she had been jonesing for a cigarette non-stop for the last two days anyway, so… “Haven’t got my fags, mate. Spare one?”</p><p>“A’right,” the fellow Brit agreed congenially, and whipped out a pack of Chesterfields; he handed one over and produced his lighter as he looked out over the Black Sea. “Something’s up, ain’t it? We’ve been turned out to funny dispositions, and there’s a second one of the big bosses up here, the Lady in the Corset. They say she came in with a high value prisoner. Probably got some kind of intel.”</p><p>Hermione stiffened as she struck up the cigarette and took a long drag of relief, in which she faked her pleasure when her nicotine-starved mind compared it unfavourably to a papirosa. <em> These things are as weak as shit. What’s the point of the damned filter anyway? Dead is dead. </em></p><p>“Well, I reckon no matter what’s up, it’ll be a lot of fun,” Hermione grinned as she lowered the cigarette and handed the pack back. “Thanks, mate.”</p><p>“That’s what they said to tell the troops,” he agreed, chuckling. “See ya around, mate!”</p><p>Hermione waved, and checked her chronometer. <em> Time. Past </em> <em> time, actually</em><em>. Shit. </em></p><p>She brought the map up, taking another puff on her cigarette, and oriented herself to the bunker. <em> Alright, alright… Ready… </em> She fished her wand out of the inside of her uniform jacket. She had known this spell for years and years, but has refused to use it because of how wildly dangerous and uncontrollable it was. And now, after five years of being a soldier, she was going to use it casually as a mere <em> diversion. </em> Advanced Dark Magic.</p><p>Anything to win, that was the motto now, right? Still, in a nod to the muggle laws of war that felt vaguely futile, she repeated the incantation, completed the spell that Bellatrix had taught her, and from a uniform of the Janissaries, she was again in her practical, camouflaged Russian uniform. Now she was committed, now she acted. Now she prayed to a God she didn’t believe in that she could control it for as long as necessary.</p><p>“<em>Fiendus Incendiari!</em>”</p><p>An explosion of fiery chimaeras and dragons tore out overhead, erupting through the streets of Yalta, with windows exploding from the passage of flames, men shouting in shock and fear. Hermione pitted her control of the magic against the hunger of the Fiendfyre for the living. She directed the fire up into the air, to consume the sky, shadowing a broad Moskovska Street in the column of flame above. She held onto it with the desperation of someone who was motivated to avoid becoming a murderer, because she could easily kill hundreds or thousands if she erred. The Brightest Witch of Her Age now faced the abrupt and savage challenge of guiding the Fiendfyre down, until, without igniting the rest of the city, a hideous firestorm descended on the barracks of Rookwood’s wizarding continents and the building itself seemed to detonate from the flame consuming around it.</p><p>All along Moskovska Street, people lived because she had controlled the Fiendfyre, instead of letting it descend to consume them as it had travelled half the length of the city to reach her target. The building erupted into hell, melting and charring visibly even from the distance at which Hermione was controlling the Fiendfyre, or trying too, as the horrifying beast of flame tried to escape her grasp, spreading to the lines of trucks and armoured cars outside of the barracks and quickly triggering secondary explosions from their fuel tanks, adding to the immensity of the conflagration.</p><p>It was perhaps inevitable, for all that she tried so hard, that she began to lose control. She was not a Dark Sorceress, she did not practice the Dark Arts. So it was exactly as Hermione had feared, or even expected, that she lost control of it, and could only watch as the fire erupted outwards from the Barracks, and reached out to consume the surrounding buildings, threatening to rapidly turn the northern part of the city centre into a firestorm. It looked for a moment, as it rocketed from house to house, ripping across the better part of six blocks and turning them all into a hell of fire, that it might be totally unstoppable. Hermione felt frozen in place as she contemplated the prospect that her actions would kill hundreds, or thousands, of innocents.</p><p>And then someone in the middle of the inferno, who might be in that moment in the process of burning to death, still had an intact wand and uttered the necessary incantation to bring it to a halt. The destruction was as neat as if an entire wing of bombers had walked napalm incendiaries across the city, but it was done . Guttering flames in dozens of buildings were left behind. The reality was that an enemy Wizard or Witch had saved her from her own moral culpability, strictly for the reasons of foiling her. It was as unsettling as hell to think about.</p><p>And then six wizards of the Morsmordre apparated in front of her simultaneously, and she didn’t have the think to think . When they took in that the attack had been executed by a single Witch in the uniform of the Russian MinKol, they stared for a blank moment in shock at the wild courage it had required.</p><p>“Until my last dying breath,” Hermione muttered, dropping the cigarette to the ground and striking the leader with a shout of “<em>Confrigo!</em>”</p><p>The fight was on.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix had stepped into Rookwood’s command post, gotten herself hot coffee from the thermos, <em> heathen, </em> took advantage of the milk to mix it up into German-style Milchkaffee, which was better than nothing, and wandered over to where the fellow Death Eater was reviewing reports. “Augustus.”</p><p>“Bellatrix,” He looked up. “I’ll let you know as soon as your damned aeroplane has a time to be ready to leave. You can apparate straightaway there, if you like.”</p><p>Bellatrix translated that as ‘get out of my hair, witch’. Which was fair, she was being bother, though not as much of a bother as she was about to be. “I’d need someone to hold my prisoner while I waited for them to finish the repairs,” Bellatrix answered. “ <em> Merlin, </em> isn’t it something, all of this muggle technology we use now?”</p><p>“We can restrict it when we’ve finished them,” Augustus shrugged. “For the moment, we need to just finish putting them and the traitors away. They don’t know when to quit, they never know when to quit.”</p><p>“I suppose you’re right, though I have liked the challenge all of these days,” Bellatrix admitted, and that was a sincere feeling even now. “Fortunately, we are a far more resourceful breed.”</p><p>She glanced at her chrono. <em> Time. </em> Bellatrix took another drink of her coffee, and waited for the moment to come. It didn’t.</p><p><em> What are you up to, Granger? What’s gone wrong? </em> A chill began to settle inside of Bellatrix as she considered the possibility of the damned mudblood failing in her mission. She wanted to be angry, very angry, about it. <em> I gave you everything up to and including the fucking you needed so badly, you damned mudslut. I sullied myself for you and you’re still going to fuck it up and get me killed? </em></p><p>All she could do was silently fume inside with impotent rage and wait. Augustus saw her checking her chrono, too. “Again, if you’re that impatient, get out of my way and apparate with your prisoner to Feodosiya,” he smirked. “I’m sure they can find you a room there to wait in. Did you have fun last night?”</p><p>“I don’t fuck mud,” Bellatrix sneered. “There’s a difference between a pureblood woman and a <em> mudslut.</em>” The lies came easy, but even as they did, they left Bellatrix feeling uneasy, because she had done exactly what she was claiming that she had not done. She had, in fact, fucked mud. Something in Hermione’s insistent confidence had, in a moment of drunken weakness and fear for this day, led her astray. And all for nothing, because they were past go-time, and nothing had happened…</p><p>A shrill alarm cut the air. Bellatrix snapped to look back at Augustus, whose response was lost in the sound. “What the hell is that, Rookwood?”</p><p>“That’s the air-raid siren…”</p><p>An officer ran in and saluted. “Sir! There’s been an explosion at the Wizard barracks on Vasiljeva Street!”</p><p>Rookwood turned away. “<em>What the devil</em>?!”</p><p>When he did, Bellatrix whipped out her wand.</p><p>“SIR!” The officer’s eyes went wide.</p><p>“<em>Expelliarmus!” </em> She cried right behind Rookwood, sending his wand flying in the opposite direction that he went flying. Then she spun toward one of the other wizards in the room and used another spell entirely: “<em>Avada kedavra!</em>” The killing curse struck the unfortunate junior wizard dead-on and he dropped, his mortal life snuffed out, to the floor of the post.</p><p>A gun barked as another wizard, distracted by the fight, fell dead from gunfire. Dodson’s gun.</p><p>Rookwood was back up to his feet as a quick <em> Sectumsempra </em> from Bellatrix tore guttering wounds into another of the Wizards that had been with him. He was making a dead run for his wand when Bella got him with the cry of “<em>Petrificus Totalus!</em>” As Rookwood dropped, there was only one witch left in the uniform of the Morsmordre, and she was ready and caught the first of Bellatrix’s spells in a block.</p><p>The two of them duelled in a quick exchange of block and strike, of shield and <em> Confrigo, </em> taking down several of the muggle technicians who could not get out of the way in time. But the anonymous witch was one, those who had switched sides were many. With several wizards who had defected with Dodson and Tarrant supporting her, Bellatrix easily pinned the woman, until a Janissary sergeant armed with a British L74A1 combat shotgun approached her from behind.</p><p>The boom of the full load of buckshot collapsing the young woman in a blasting hail of blood brought an abrupt end to the fighting inside of the Hotel Taurica. She fell, but still she twitched, and so, with the cruel compassion of war, the sergeant levelled the gun at her shattered body, pumped the action, and put her out of her misery. The final boom of the gun and spray of blood settled on the room, and Bellatrix slowly took a deep breath. “Send the signal to all units!”</p><p>“At once, Madame Black!” Dodson turned back toward an undamaged bank of radios.</p><p>Then she approached the immobilised Augustus Rookwood, with the sneer firmly set on her face. “Just a little bit of a hint for you, Rooky,” she laughed. “<em>Nobody </em> makes Bellatrix Black their slave. Not even the Dark Lord.”</p><p>“<em>I</em><em>MPERIO!” </em> She tore into his will and mind with sharp precision, pitting her power with her wand in her right, intact hand against his wandless, bound body. She took him over, and she commanded him exactly as she needed to, as outside, the fight now raged as Dodson and Tarrant’s men worked to quickly secure the city.</p><p>“Up and over to the Pensieve of Command,” she ordered. It was a strange device, a Pensieve, with the pool of memories in it—memories from each of the soldiers in an ensorcelled military unit—with a strange old set of bronze interlocking wheels and gears that was mounted inside of it, partially in the pool of memories, and partially out of it. A <em> Telecaster. </em> There was a rumour that the first of these had been invented by the Priestesses of Kaptaria, the ancient civilisation of the Minoans, during the age of Iphigenia. As troops were forcibly conscripted to be ensorcelled to fight for Voldemort, they had some of their memories added to the Pensieve. Then the Telecaster could send to all of those whose memories had been collected, when energized magically, a spell which had been placed into it.</p><p>In this case, the Imperious Curse.</p><p>In that way, a Death Eater could instantly command an entire Army of muggles to obey his or her will.</p><p>“Transfer command of the Fifth Army to me,” Bellatrix ordered Rookwood.</p><p>“I, Augustus Rookwood, do hereby execute the Change-of-Command Ceremony for the Fifth Army to my fellow Death Eater, Bellatrix Black, per her order, I place the Army at her disposal.”</p><p>The Telecaster glowed green and spun its gears and wheels, coated slick with the water of memories, until it reoriented a radiant gemstone toward Bellatrix. The woman let out a triumphant shriek.</p><p>“The Fifth Army will immediately halt all offensive and defensive combat operations against the forces of the Confederation of Independent States, and will contact the CIS troops in Sevastopol and immediately inform them that Operation Taurida is in Effect. As CIS troops approach the lines, the Fifth Army will welcome them into its defensive perimeters peacefully, and all units will conform their movements to troops of the CIS and General and Colonel-rank officers issuing orders at the brigade level,” Bellatrix continued. “Pursuant to the normal operational orders for the Fifth Army, my Chief of Staff, General Dodson, will now issue detailed operational instructions.”</p><p>She turned away from the Telecaster-Pensieve, and stepped up to Rookwood’s side, madness fully in her eyes and a grin on her lips. “You really shouldn’t fucking insult me. You shouldn’t have pretended I am the old bitch that you can safely ignore. I am still as dangerous as I was when I was twenty, and worse, because of the experience. You see… I am going to make your life living hell now.” Bellatrix caressed his cheek, and then stepped away. “<em>Crucio!” </em> She tore into the hapless man she dominated with the Imperius curse, inflicting the fullness of horrifying torture on him. “That’s for saying I’d fuck a mudblood!”</p><p>“CRUCIO!” Again she ripped into him, “and that’s for terrorising and torturing Granger, you cowardly shit!”</p><p>“CRUCIO!” She laughed. “You’ll be worse off than the Longbottoms by the time I’m done with you!”</p><p>“<em>CRUCIO</em>!” She almost doubled over with laughter, now.</p><p>Then the crack of a gun split the air once and once more, and a spray of blood exploded from Rookwood’s head as the two bullets tore through him at close range. He toppled to the floor of the command post, instantly dead.</p><p>Bellatrix stared dumbly.</p><p>“Madame Black,” Dodson said formally, holstering his pistol and facing her, at parade rest. “Since we’re going to be on the same side as the CIS now, we don’t need a shambles, we must observe the formalities now . He deserved it, but they would still not like it, and we need you in command, giving orders and making sure your agreement is upheld, for all of our sakes.”</p><p>She looked at him with a glare, a very dangerous glare.</p><p>He met it. “Ma’am, there’s still fighting in the city.”</p><p>“<em>Granger,</em>” Bellatrix hissed. Without another word, she dropped the matter of Rookwood’s bloody corpse and apparated straight for the firm-fixed image of the young muggleborn witch in her mind.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione had thought she was dead for sure. She had fought them five to one, and gotten three when a <em> Sectumsempra </em> tore through her left shoulder, leaving her left arm flopping uselessly against her side and agony tearing through her body as blood flowed out onto the ground. Toppling into the snow-covered grass between lanes of the road close to the shore, her face planted among abandoned cigarette butts and scattered trash, she struggled to her feet and then managed to collapse to the left to dodge the evil green power of a Killing Curse that otherwise would have finished her, if it hadn’t been sent awkwardly by a young wizard who should have tried something less final but easier to execute in the middle of the duel.</p><p>Her obligation to keep the fight going, to help the Army defect, pushed her onwards. She struggled to her feet, and blocked the next attack with <em> Protego, </em> the blood soaking through her uniform. Hermione felt her power and her physical energy fade, as she blocked another and another attack.</p><p><em> I am not going to let you down, Bella! I am not! </em> The thought came unbidden, and it forced her through another series of four smart blocks against her opponents, but more people were coming up and she didn’t know if they were friends or foes. Her vision was starting to go blurry, and she imagined that like Larissa she was losing a lot of blood from the deep wounds.</p><p>Then one of the wizards she was fighting got in an <em> Expulso </em> that detonated with a massive roar of blue energy next to her, tearing into the ground, and violently throwing her. She felt herself flying over the Lenina Embankment and crashing down into the water. The cold sea slamming into her, soaking her, her blood floating into it—for a moment it revived her, as she wondered dumbly how she had managed to avoid a concussion.</p><p>She was trying to drag herself out, putting her wand between her teeth to avoid losing it, trying to use her good hand, her mind cursing her: <em> Use a spell you idiot, why are you using your hand? </em> But she couldn’t seem to put everything together until she finally remembered to use the levitation charm, and floated up … Directly into the sight of the two wizards running toward where she had gone flying into the sea, ready to finish her off.</p><p>As one, they raised their wands. Then a flock of angry, magically generated birds tore into them, biting, pecking, howling down on them from above. In a snap, with a second apparation, Bellatrix Black appeared between Hermione and her tormentors. She ripped into them, completely fresh and unwounded, her bent wand blocking each attack as the terrified wizards tried to understand why a Death Eater was attacking them. They did not know that it was a coup d’état, they did not know that she had changed sides. They were fighting thinking it was an attack on their Army, and it was their duty to fight back, that was all; they were trying to kill a Russian enemy. Now they were suddenly faced with a political dimension they had not imagined.</p><p>With a minute, Bellatrix sent one flying back into a fountain, where his collision with a statue dropped him unconscious into the water. The second, she disarmed and bound, and it was over, just like that. She had attacked like a Fury, like a thing of power, her duelling perfectly poised and balanced. She let things get through that she knew would be turned by the magic-repelling potential of her dragonskin corset, and used those blows she ignored to strike harder at them, until both had been neatly disabled.</p><p>And then she raised her wand to finish them. “<em>Avada Ked-- </em> ”</p><p>“No, Bella, don’t, they’re finished!” Hermione screamed from behind her. “They’re <em> helpless!</em>”</p><p>“Why does it <em> matter, </em> Granger?!” Bella screamed back, stopping in her tracks.</p><p>“Because it’s <em> wrong, </em> and you’ve <em> done enough</em>! You’re a <em> heroine </em> now, Bella, seize the chance! You don’t have to execute people anymore!”</p><p>Bellatrix turned toward her with a snort, shaking her head and laughing in bemusement, a bemusement that sounded like she was almost aghast at the prospect of being called a heroine. “Granger, you don’t have a damn… Oh <em> Merlin </em> are you wounded.” Without another thought, the dark witch dashed to Hermione’s side and grabbed her. “Come on, right now.”</p><p>Bellatrix immediately disapparated Hermione away from the Lenina Embankment and back to the front of the Hotel Taurica, where the medics had set up to handle the casualties. Bellatrix laid her gently down onto one of the stretchers. “Get to her immediately. <em> Sectumsempra, </em> left shoulder, severe blood loss,” Bellatrix said, her words clipped, efficient, conveying what the mediwitches needed.</p><p>Then she turned, and sucked in her breath. Hermione followed her gaze, and for some reason, smiled like an idiot. The Morsmordre had gone fluttering down from the flagpole in front of the hotel. In its stead, Mardy had produced from Bellatrix’s luggage an immense black standard which two of the Janissaries now hoisted. Fluttering in the winter wind, this black flag held the Arms of the House Black, surmounted with a Death’s Head crowned with the laurels of victory. Mailed fist and gauntlet brandished a sword over the black chevron and the three Jackdaws.</p><p><em> Toujours Pur. </em> The motto unfurled, and fluttered in the breeze below the Coat of Arms. </p><p>Bellatrix stood there in the cold sea air. Her hair fluttered like the standard of her family that was now hoisted above the Hotel and the City. She looked beautiful.</p><p>Hermione passed out from the blood loss, her eyes filled with Bellatrix.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. I owe the design of the Telecaster, though the function is slightly different and adapted to Harry Potter magic, to Thomas Harlan and his wonderful "Oath of Empire" series.<br/>2. Taurica, or Taurida, is the ancient name of the Crimean peninsula.<br/>3. Kaptaria is the name that the Minoans had for themselves, as recorded in ancient Egyptian texts. It remains very obscure as the proper name for Minoan Civilisation.<br/>4. The British L74A1 was originally the American Remington 870.<br/>5. The Standard of the House of Black is inspired by this version of the Black Family Coat of Arms:<br/>https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/harrypotter/images/1/1e/Toujours_Pur.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20180306014425<br/>6. I will just make here the short note that in political terms, Bellatrix has defected; but in moral terms, nothing has yet changed.<br/></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0028"><h2>28. The Offensive</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Offensive.</p><p> </p><p>Larissa finished cinching the belt over her greatcoat, and then pulled her gloves on. With a cigarette dangling from her lips, she looked every inch the diffident and bold officer that she was, with a somewhat rakish air on account of the big pair of silvered sunglasses, very dark, she wore to protect her eyes from the snow glare. Ginny sat with her on the back of the roaring ex-Janissary Chally II, now painted with a homemade version of Bellatrix’s family crest, which had been instantly adopted as the symbol of the Black Guards.</p><p>“I don’t understand at all how the two of you stand those muggle cancer-sticks,” Ginny said with a sigh.</p><p>“Cancer-stick? What the hell?” Larissa shrugged and looked at her with a questioning expression that interrupted her devil-may-care act.</p><p>“It’s what my father called them,” Ginny shook her head, looking glum for a moment.</p><p>“Sorry, Ginny,” Larissa answered with a sigh. Hermione really was the glue that held them together. She was cordial with the English redheaded witch, but it was Hermione who made them all friends. And Hermione was gone, her fate unknown, in the hands of Bellatrix Lestrange. They wouldn’t know until their own date with destiny was over.</p><p>And it was about to begin. Ahead of them, the hills and ridges around the city of Stavropol rose. They were about to storm it.</p><p>“Time?” Ginny asked, all business now, her face scrunching up with a look of determination worthy of battle or the Quidditch field.</p><p>Larissa raised her hand, wand firmly gripped, in the air. “TIME!” She gave the incantation and signalled everyone in the unit – and a moment later, the better part of the Wizard Protection Battalion as well as seventy Witches and Wizards apparated from the vehicles which had brought them close straight into the heart of Stavropol, more than seven hundred troops covering them.</p><p>Outside of the city, the ex-Janissary Division they were now fighting with—Now informally First Division, Black’s Guards—charged in with another twenty wizards who had followed Bellatrix’s turn, providing them cover.</p><p>Larissa’s target was the central train station. She apparated at once into the roundabout in front of the elegant old station which fronted Karl Marx Prospect. With Ginny at her side, she didn’t hesitate in unleashing <em> Bombarda </em> directly into the building to the northwest across the boulevard, shattering the café to deny any cover, while groups of wizards and troops rushed inside of the Station.</p><p>There were a few sharp bursts of gunfire and a flare of magical flame inside, quickly dampened lest it burn the structure down. Outside, Larissa peeled off with her squad and stormed the youth hostel to the south, encountering only light resistance from a couple of patrols of ensorcelled troops that they quickly dispatched, the usual rear-area forces that put up no real resistance.</p><p>In fact, there was very little resistance at all, because Larissa had intentionally attacked a weakly defended target. She waited for one of her wizards to get to the top of the station, where from an open window he sent the <em> Bombarda Maxima </em> ploughing into the industrial complex across the tracks from the passenger station.</p><p>That <em> quickly </em> got the attention of the defenders, as again, and again, magical blasts flew across the muggle city openly, in a way unfathomable only five years before. Yes, she could have attacked the Morsmordre Wizards in their strength as the beginning of her assault, but Larissa hadn’t wanted to let them dictate the terms of the engagement. Now, they would come to her instead, trying to control the situation, cautious and uncertain about why she had demurred from going on the offensive to start the duel.</p><p>There was, in fact, no reason for them to be cautious. But it let Larissa playing the long game, the division’s troops flooding into the city with no wizards to stop them. And that was precisely what she had wanted.</p><p>She cast a speaking spell from her wand, to carry her voice to all the wizards in the force, and Major Lukachenko. “Alright, in about one minute, fifty of these shits are going to be showing up to duel us, and we’re going to catch them between two fires—train station and hostel. We’re going to pin them in place long enough for the First to take the city, that’s all. Questions? Of course not!”</p><p>Tossing the cigarette butt to the ground and grinning to Ginny, she spun back to the northwest, covered by a lean-to off the hostel, the low sun at her right shoulder, and faced the first of her attackers as they began to arrive , fighting personally at the head of the troops who she led in Hermione’s absence. For all her devil-may-care attitude, it was a very practical, patient plan.</p><p>If only Hermione had the luck to be with someone who could similarly separate her persona and reality.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>When Hermione came to again, she was back in her bed, in the suite that Bellatrix had been given, in the Hotel Taurica. For a moment, fear stabbed her, that she had dreamed all of it, that the operation had not yet begun. She struggled for a moment against bonds which were no longer on her, until it made her realise they were gone, and the tightness, and pressure, was from the bandages swaddling and wrapping her left shoulder. There was a tautness in the skin, but nothing more. And she was in a rude sort of hospital gown, probably made from sheets. <em> Awkward. </em> Such was the times, however.</p><p>Bottles of water and vials of potion sat on the night-stand by the bed. There was a surgical pad under where her shoulder had been, to keep the sheets clean. Hermione sighed with a ragged sense of relief, and sagged back into the blankets and pillows. It was feeling a little bit like she was in the medical ward at Hogwarts again, and with a wry expression on her face at the none-too-fond memories, Hermione rolled over and read the instructions on the vials, and seeing that she <em> could </em> take one, did so promptly, and then greedily gulped down one of the bottles of water, and then looked for her wand. It was there on the night-stand, too, so she wasn’t a prisoner.</p><p>The last memory of Bellatrix had very much suggested that wouldn’t be the case, however. Unfortunately, Hermione hadn’t the faintest idea of when it was, so she stretched out and tried to find something to do. This wasn’t Britain, though, and the Salvos hadn’t left a Bible in a drawer of the night-stand, so she couldn’t even read <em> that. </em> The television had the forgotten air of something which hadn’t worked in almost five years; broadcast TV had mostly died on the day the nukes flew, and never come back. And, the power was flickering intermittently, which suggested magic was in use extensively nearby. Something more sophisticated like a television would have just blown up if it was turned on, anyway.</p><p>With nothing to distract her, Hermione couldn’t help it. Within a few minutes, she was thinking of the night she had shared with Bellatrix. For all that she felt better afterwards, the memory wouldn’t escape her. She might have expatiated the memory of being held down on the floor of the Malfoy Manor, but there was a new memory: Passionate, intense, pleasurable, with a Bella surprisingly tolerant of awkwardness and her inexperience.</p><p>And for some reason, Hermione was recuperating in Bella’s suite. There was arguably no need for this, but here she was. For whatever reason, Bella had kept her close. Bella, too, had stayed her hand when Hermione had asked her to. <em> That, </em> in particular, was almost shocking. Any of Hermione’s friends would have had that decency—she liked to think it was something of a prerequisite to friendship with her—and she wouldn’t have anticipated it from Bellatrix Black, but the woman had restrained herself.</p><p>There was a thrill that shot through her, unbidden and unwelcome, at the prospect that maybe Bellatrix wanted something out of this. She wasn’t sure how think about the way she even felt, but then there was a knock on the door.</p><p>“Come in,” Hermione replied automatically, expecting the mediwitch.</p><p>It was Bellatrix. “Granger, you’re awake. Good.” Her voice was curt, and again she used Hermione’s surname.</p><p>The younger witch couldn’t hide a small sigh, but Bellatrix ignored it, and tossed a pile of clothes down on her bed. “A fresh uniform for you.”</p><p>“We’re in contact with Russian forces again…?”</p><p>“We are, but Sevastopol hardly had uniforms to spare, Granger,” Bellatrix said, and Hermione couldn’t tell if she were being mocked or not by the tone in Bellatrix’s voice. “Admiral Sobolev <em> is </em> coming to meet with us shortly, however, and I wanted you there for it. The mediwitch said you <em> should </em> have recovered enough for that. So do try to get up and get dressed, especially since I made the uniform for you with a quick spell.” Bella laughed, then. “We’ve already shocked the world, now we just have to finish the job. I’m gonna have fun, mud—Granger.” A sigh at her own mistake. “Or not.”</p><p>Hermione grimaced. Bellatrix hadn’t even gotten the point of not using slurs yet, let alone made a sincere effort to stop, though at least the older witch had regretted it after she'd started to say it. Or pretended to. Hermione pushed herself to her feet in a defiant show of her ability, though she favoured her left shoulder… It wasn’t important in combat for a right-handed witch.</p><p>“Do you want to stay in the room while I change my clothes, Bella? Check out your <em> mudblood</em>?” Hermione shot the word with particular vehemence, and watched Bellatrix stiffen as if she were caught out. “Do you remember where your tongue was?”</p><p>“Oh, fuck off, Granger,” Bellatrix dramatically rolled her eyes. “I’m not the first and I won’t be the last pureblood to roll in the mud.”</p><p>Hermione stepped closer to the shorter woman. “But in the end, all of them were hypocrites.”</p><p>“Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” Bellatrix shrugged, and turned away to step out of the room.</p><p>“So I’m already your vice, then, Bella? What if I choose to take that as a compliment!”</p><p>The door closing quickly turned into a particularly hard slam as Bellatrix left. Hermione looked at the scar on her arm. <em> Mudblood. </em></p><p><em> You put it there, but your lust didn’t know the difference. If I choose to take pride in it, what will you do then? </em> That was a feeling of sickening intensity, but it seemed to be something Bellatrix was completely unprepared for: Throwing it back in her face. Still, it scared Hermione. She <em> hurt. </em> That word <em> hurt. </em> It took <em> effort </em> to ignore it, to use it to refer to herself, to throw it back at Bellatrix. She wanted to curl away and wince when it was used instead, and most of all, considering what had passed between them, she wanted Bellatrix to just stop.</p><p>Still in pain, and with limited use of her left shoulder, Hermione nonetheless fully dressed in the crisp uniform that had been magically prepared for her, and then settled her wand into the holster, and stepped out.</p><p>Bella was standing in front of the windows which gave the suite a view of the Lenina Embankment and the harbour, nursing a cup of tea. As usual, the engageantes and gloves served to completely cover her arms, made it impossible to see any scars, or the way her left arm was now enchanted, finely wrought gold. Someone like Moody might have gladly showed off what was missing, but Bella shrouded it as much as she could.</p><p>“Can I have a cuppa before we go, Bella?”</p><p>“I <em> guess,</em>” the older woman answered with a hint of petulance. “I don’t mind keeping Generals waiting. Or Admirals. Or whatever the muggles call themselves today.”</p><p>Hermione poured herself a cup from the pot and walked up to Bellatrix’s side by the windows. “We <em>did </em>win,” she offered graciously, feeling hesitant and out-of-sorts. “Worth celebrating?”</p><p>“Like Hell we have. I promised them the Dnepr.” Bellatrix looked almost livid—but the anger was directed at herself, Hermione realised. It was relieving, in a way. “So we’ll be moving out very soon. We’re supposed to be going down to a briefing. Just bring your tea. Everyone will be drinking something to keep them awake.” She turned away, and refilled her own tea. “He knows, now. The whole world knows.”</p><p>Hermione could see that Bellatrix had pulled in on herself. She stood there like a tree in a hurricane, looking out over the harbour, her whole world uprooted, but standing firm, and now it was time to get back to business. The strength was alluring, even as Hermione felt compassion, <em> compassion? She’s upset over the fact she betrayed Voldemort. She doesn’t deserve compassion for that! She needs to get over it and be thankful. </em></p><p>But the world never was that simple, was it?</p><p>“Come on, Granger, let’s go,” Bellatrix shrugged, and the elder witch carried on through the halls and down the stairs to the headquarters room, Hermione trailing in her wake. Discipline kept her a half step to the left and two steps behind.</p><p>Then she found a place to hid her teacup and followed Bellatrix in to come to attention. “Admiral,” she addressed, keeping herself composed. But it was hard. Even the commander of the Sevastopol garrison had nearly starved. His uniform was in good shape, one he had saved in hopes of this moment, doubtlessly, but he was a scarecrow inside of it. The other Russian and Ukrainian officers—both countries, which had a long-running dispute over the fleet and city, had been required to put aside their differences to fight Voldemort—Army, Navy, Air Forces, were similarly thin. It was a sign of their need for sustenance that the usual military decorum of such a serious meeting was marred by the fact that the Hotel Taurica’s kitchens had served up finger food to them.</p><p>“Councillor. We had been told … Madame Black had assistance from our forces,” Admiral Sobolev acknowledged. “The situation is in good hands?”</p><p>“In good hands, Sir,” Hermione answered. “I’m confident she’s in full operational control and aligned with our interests.”</p><p>“Good, good.” Admiral Sobolev’s eyes were weary, he looked exhausted, but he was also defiant, and triumphant. He had defended Sevastopol for twelve months, half again as long as it had been defended during the Great Patriotic War, and as long as it had been defended during the Crimean War. And he had been successfully relieved, even if the circumstances almost beggared belief.</p><p>Bellatrix stepped up to the Admiral and nodded politely. She didn’t extend her hand for a moment, but when Sobolev extended his own, took it in her gloved hand for a modest shake.</p><p>“Madame Black,” he addressed her. “I assure you that within our continued power of endurance, our forces are already moving, and will support your offensive to the utmost.”</p><p>“I understand, Admiral, that you are being modest,” she answered, and Hermione was relieved that she was being gracious toward the man. “My officers tell me that it was your troops that took Yevpatoriya the day before yesterday.”</p><p>“They did,” he smiled. “I understand, in turn, we are already converging on Krasnoperekopsk.”</p><p>“You would be correct. Just as my right column is approaching Medvedivka. We will soon have a break-out from the Peninsula.” She stepped forward, and if nothing else, Bellatrix could still command a crowd. That she was so short and so ragged, mattered not at all. She was still fantastically beautiful despite her imperfections, and had an almost unnatural charisma. “My officers, and my allies of the Confederation of Independent States, we now stand on the cusp of the first great blow of our project to reclaim the Ukraine from our enemy’s hands.”</p><p>Nobody, of course, said a thing about how two weeks beforehand, Bellatrix Black had been one of those enemies. She grinned, and nodded to her subordinate. “General Dodson, the briefing.”</p><p>The former Janissary officer stepped up to the table with a long pointer in hand. “Madame Black, Officers of the Confederation. Today our forces are on the cusp of breaking out on two lines of advance from the Crimean Peninsula. To the west we will proceed through Chaplynka Raion – Direction Kakhovka. Because the dam at Kakhovka cannot be easily destroyed, it’s the first objective of the Tenth Janissary Division to seize Kakhovka. We have been in communication Astana, and the plan is for Long Range Aviation assets to drop the bridges at Kherson with guided weapons. If this does not take place, we will have to accept the risk of shifting one brigade toward Kherson.”</p><p>Dodson marked on the positions systematically on the map as he spoke. While he did, Bellatrix shifted a few feet over, to stand by Hermione. The younger witch tensed a bit, but said nothing, listening to the briefing.</p><p>“Their job is to secure Kherson beyond the Dnepr. In doing so they secure our left flank. That will allow the remaining three divisions to advance toward Melitopol, with the Confederal forces. Melitopol is inadequate, however. The enemy does not have extensive forces in the Donbass, except a police presence against guerrilla resistance and to keep order in the mines. So we will continue north to Zaporizhia. We must obtain the city on the east bank within three days—an advance of three hundred and twenty kilometres. This advance will continue toward Zaporizhia with the Fourteenth and Sixteenth divisions. The Ninth will turn east at Melitopol and advance direction Marioupol. The confederal forces will follow to the north as the reserve – you must reach Zaporizhia one day later.” This was a practical matter, because their exhausted, starved men could not be expected to maintain the punishing pace of a veteran tank Army charging forward against its foe. The men of the Sevastopol garrison understood this, even if they did not like leaving the liberation of the Eastern Ukraine to these men who had been their enemies only days before.</p><p>“On the fourth day, we must take Novomoskovsk. Again, Long Range Aviation will be tasked with the destruction of the bridges at Zaporizhia and Dnepropetrovsk. Without the destruction of these bridges we must expect to be heavily attacked in the left flank and drawn into city fighting in one of the two cities.” He paused for a moment. “So, we will expect Long Range Aviation to do their job.”</p><p>“If they do not, we will have to clear and destroy the bridges with sorcery, and we can expect that they will have some contingent of morons in fancy dress trying to keep us from doing so, but I will take it,” Bellatrix interjected with a bemused look. “Still, it will slow down our timetable.”</p><p>Nobody decided to bring up that Bellatrix was also in ‘fancy dress’.</p><p>“What will our own forces be doing at the same time?” Sobolev asked. “The broader strategic picture?”</p><p>“Yes, Admiral,” Dodson stepped forward again. “A major offensive will be launched from Lipetsk, direction Oryol-Bryansk. It will consist of the Fifth and Seventh Armies and the Belarusian Corps. As the forces reach Oryol, the Fifth Army is to turn south and drive for Sumy. The objective is to create a cauldron of the enemy forces around Kursk. Eighth Army in Voronezh will have the southwest horn of the attack to complete the Cauldron. Ultimately, it is our own duty to continue to advance north from Dnepropetrovsk and complete a second cauldron with Eighth Army around Kharkov. Eleventh Army will start from Voronezh and strike south to disrupt the retreat of enemy forces along the southern course of the Volga toward Kharkov and buy us time to complete the strategic operation.”</p><p><em> Thirty-one divisions. </em> Hermione wondered at it. Their own forces added another ten. <em> Forty-one, </em> then. Even considering that many of them were understrength, there would be close to three quarters of a million troops involved in the operation on their side. And in the Caucasus where her friends were fighting, still more troops were involved. So really there were at least a million allied soldiers in action for their offensive. There would be thousands of wizards and witches with them, spearheading their operations and defending them from magical attack. Hermione knew that they had roughly two and a half million troops in the entire CIS, including those supporting in Scandinavia and those supporting the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Though the Soviet Union had supported 6.5 million troops in the field in 1945, the nuclear war had made raising more than 2.5 million impossible.</p><p>It was two-fifths of the entire armed forces. Her mind flashed through the thoughts of the logistics difficulty, through burnt-out cities and wrecked bridges...</p><p>Then Hermione lost her train of thought. An electric arc seemed to shoot through her as she realised that Bellatrix leaned up to her and whispered, “enough with the boring part. Now I explain what we’re going to do.”</p><p>The older woman ambled up to the front of the table again, and this time, all the eyes were fixed on her. Hermione just hoped nobody really noticed how her’s were more interested in the way Bellatrix’s hips swayed as she walked.</p><p>“Alright, so, that’s the plan. My troops in the Caucasus are advancing toward Rostov-na-Donu, they’ll get there eventually, General Diaz has a perfect handle on the situation.” She spun around and grinned. “Our problem is that we’re all fucked if those bridges aren’t blown. So let’s speed this up a bit. I propose that I take all the witches and wizards remaining in Yalta, you do the same for your forces, Admiral—you can be covered by our sorcerers attached to the 10<sup>th </sup> Division--and we apparate immediately to Melitopol with each of us who can do so taking as many troops as possible. We’ll storm into the city centre,” she waved her wand, and dramatically flung up the large scale map and sent another map, showing the city, fluttering down neatly from the map rack onto the table, instead.</p><p>“.. And once we do, we’ll occupy the government buildings off the M18 on Kirova street and smash the military airfield. Otherwise, they’ll use it to fly in a blocking force which will hold us off for long enough to get proper field forces into Dnepropetrovsk at least. Bridges can be rebuilt. So, Admiral Sobolev, I’m going to pull the force together and go right now.”</p><p>“Madame Black, that’s a hundred and thirty kilometres by road from the forward position of your Corps.” Sobolev spoke with a measured voice, like he was not quite opposing it, but he was still gaining the estimate of the woman in front of him.</p><p>“Well,” she grinned, her wickedly ruined teeth showing, “it won’t be once I’m there. And we'll get to Zaporizhia a day early. So we're going to do it.” It was not a request, but a statement of fact by a predator. Hermione shivered. It was also <em>nuts.</em></p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione was not really sure what had possessed Bellatrix to decide that apparating with a hundred and twenty wizards and a battalion of troops to a position a hundred klicks in front of their lines (during the hours they had assembled the force in, their troops had, granted, gotten closer to Melitopol) was going to be a grand strategy for her to execute, but of course she had, and she had brooked no dissent.</p><p>One thing had been clear, though, whether or not Hermione thought it was crazy. Despite her wounds, Hermione was going with Bellatrix. She couldn’t risk Bellatrix, not considering the terms of the unbreakable oath, so as she saw it, she simply didn’t have a choice. So she got herself ready, ate a good meal, took more potions for the shoulder, and prepared herself for battle. With a squad of men linking their hands to her, a familiar enough experience, she followed the magically generated signal, though Bellatrix was right next to her and she could see the woman disapparate, the only one of their number who wasn’t taking a squad with her.</p><p>It meant that the moment Hermione arrived, she was standing in the middle of Kirova street with Bellatrix’s wand already in action in front of her. The guards on the government buildings flanking both sides of the streets were dropped even before the magnitude of the attack came in, with <em> sectumsempra </em> tearing the undefended muggles literally to pieces. The bloody end of the men seemed to bring a savage look of relief to Bellatrix’s eyes.</p><p>With a shiver, Hermione tossed her left hand up in a universal gesture, urging the men behind her onwards, and rushed the city hall, keeping <em> Protego totalum </em> up to cover the troops coming in behind her. The shoulder reminded her that she shouldn’t have done that, but she carried on with urgent haste.</p><p>Then the machine-gun nest inside of the city hall opened fire on her—with <em> Protego </em> up, no problem. Then there was another, and another… Three of them, pinning her and her team in three fields of fire as she had to keep the shield defending all of them. With hundreds of bullets ricocheting off her shields directly in front and around of her, Hermione had never felt more like she was literally <em> pinned down. </em></p><p>Then little zipping red lights, like glowing angry bees, tore past her and all around; she flinched, but carried on to the steps. They passed <em> through </em> the windows into the city hall—and then exploded them outwards, shattering the windows away cleaning, and sending bodies of defenders flying.</p><p>Pausing for a moment to regroup, Hermione glanced back to see Bellatrix give a bemused wink to her, before turning to scream orders at another one of the teams that was charging up into the Raion’s office-building across the street, the building tall enough that they could command the military airfield from it.</p><p>Hermione felt herself smiling in spite of herself, and tossed a jaunty wave in Bellatrix’s direction before turning back toward the city hall. “<em>Forward</em>!”</p><p>The former Janissary troops that she led knew exactly what to do, as Bellatrix’s glorious insanity unfolded around them. Unlike her, they were <em> veterans </em> to it.</p><p>A massive explosion blew out windows and defenders on the fifth floor, raining debris down on the street, even as Hermione threw herself into the city hall behind a brace of hurled grenades, adrenaline suppressing the pain in her shoulder that was definitely not healed yet.</p><p>Another explosion echoed from the sixth floor, and this time, Hermione didn’t bother to look. She knew what it was: Bellatrix, leading from the front, because that was the only kind of conflict that she knew.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>And this, gentle reader, begins the second thematic half of the story, "The Matter of Ararat", or the story of how our two witches go from lovers in the heat of the moment to something else; and how the quest for ancient magic may have unintended consequences, in a world riven with War.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes:</p><p>-- In 1998 both Ukrainian and Russian military forces would be present on the Crimean peninsula, and because of the war, this situation became permanent.<br/>-- Long Range Aviation was the strategic bomber force of the Soviet Union and Russia; it was disbanded in 1998 historically.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0029"><h2>29. The Tanks Were Rattling Like Thunder</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Tanks Were Rattling Like Thunder</p><p>
  <em> [the Sword] It fosters your masters, </em>
</p><p>
  <em> It plasters disasters, </em>
</p><p>
  <em> It makes the servants quickly greater </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Than their masters. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> – The Dominion of the Sword. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>Narcissa Black Malfoy had now spent ten days in a polite confinement in the Presidential Palace in Astana. She was given everything she wanted, and her communications were delivered to her—doubtless having been read first—and her outgoing mails to the rest of her government in exile were also delivered promptly, doubtlessly also after being read. Without a House Elf around to help, she relied on the staff of the palace, which meant she didn’t really have any privacy, but that was fine, because she expected none and knew that she was under surveillance the entire time.</p><p>Really, what was more grating than the confinement was not knowing what had happened to her sister. She had effectively been in a worse sort of house arrested before. She knew that she was being surveilled, from the moment that she had arrived in the CIS. The problem was whether or not her sister was still alive, whether or not she had succeeded in the absurd task that she placed before herself. For all she had sometimes hated Bella, she had never stopped loving her, either. <em> You idiot, you glorious idiot, big sister. What’s happening to you? </em> The longer the wait was, the more that she worried.</p><p>Then at about ten on the clock, there was a sharp knock on the door. Narcissa pointed her wand at the door and commanded it open. “Come in.”</p><p>“Madame Malfoy,” the young Kazakh MinKol Witch at the door, in her dress uniform, stepped in, and politely bowed. “His Excellency the President will see you in an hour.”</p><p>“Thank you, Officer,” she said, her eyes whipping around to focus on the woman. “I’ll be ready.”</p><p>The woman bowed again, and turned back out. Narcissa closed the door after her, and forced herself through the routine of getting dressed and her makeup set out perfectly with the help of a few spells, in the finest professional women’s business suit of the muggle world that she had been able to obtain.</p><p>Her fingers trembled so hard that it was difficult to do it right. She could remember herself, Andy, Bella, as children. She could remember her father’s hand in a way that chilled her to the bone even now. She could remember running away, into the loving arms of a graceful, dignified, and to her, caring man of her own blood, who could protect her from her father and give her the life she had dreamed off since she was young. He had been at her side, through everything, through giving birth to Draco, through the good times, and the hard times, right until he met his fate worse than death, saving her and her son.</p><p>In the end, that meant she would love Lucius forever. The hard times and the disagreements and the way their relationship had nearly collapsed in the Second Wizarding War had vanished forever. But that was all for memories which would not come again.</p><p>When she thought of Bella, protecting her from her father, when she thought of running away, and leaving her elder sister to scandal, to Voldemort, to the Lestranges, she shivered and her heart chilled. Now, it was like navigating an enchanted maze, where one wrong turn might doom not just her but also Draco, and Bella.</p><p>She steeled herself, and forced her hands through the motions of the spells to finish assembling her clothes and set her makeup in place perfectly. She reviewed herself in the mirror with all of the composed dignity that she could muster. Then, with no other time left to prepare, and with her heart trembling but her body composed, Narcissa presented herself at the door, and five minutes before eleven on the clock, the Witch returned with two guards as escorts.</p><p>“Lead on,” Narcissa commanded before anything else could be said.</p><p>The woman dipped her head. “Of course. This way, Madame Malfoy.”</p><p>Like a Lioness in Winter, she strode through the palace with her escort, carrying herself erect and with all the hauteur that she could muster. One way or another, she was Lady Malfoy, and the fact that they had given her time to get ready implied it wasn’t a trip to meet a firing squad.</p><p>Indeed, they were heading down into the bunkers below the palace, she quickly realised. Her expression tightened, seriously. She had never expected to be welcomed into these areas, where classified information was being exchanged and collated.</p><p>It meant that something significant had happened, and that it was positive. Down through the grey corridors she walked, her heart quickening in anticipation, until she was led through the vault doors which were the entrance to the emergency operations room.</p><p>“Madame Malfoy,” Nursultan Nazarbayev looked up from a table, with screens projecting information in front of him and a map drawn out across it. He rose to shake her hand.</p><p>“Your Excellency, thank you,” she acknowledged after shaking his hand. Five years ago, she would have never touched a filthy muggle, but now she had accepted that this man held altogether great power, was cunning, and needed to be respected for this. It was the only way to have any hope for the future at all, when it came to Wizarding Britain.</p><p>“By all means, call me Mister President,” he corrected. “Please have a seat.”</p><p>She moved to sit, hiding her surprise. “I don’t understand.”</p><p>“I will treat you as any other Head of Government, now. Please, review this.” He pushed over to her the neat paperwork of an official declaration.</p><p>
  <em> On the Alliance between the Confederation of Independence States and the British Government in Exile. </em>
</p><p>“It’s said,” Nazarbayev spoke with bemusement in his intelligent eyes, “That Stalin once asked how many divisions the Pope has. Well, I can tell you, Madame Malfoy, how many divisions <em> you </em> have: Eighteen, counting the ensorcelled troops. Some will doubtless volunteer when they are freed, to get revenge.”</p><p>Narcissa read to the end of the document. It placed her troops under the overall command of Stavka, but allowed her to make appointments of officers, even to high rank, on her own. It also subordinated her foreign policy to that of the Confederation, and directed that she would make decisions in the interests of the overall foreign policy decisions of the Alliance. <em> In short, he wants me very much under his thumb. </em> But he was being polite about it, praising her for what her sister had done.</p><p>“Your sister has brought across her forces exactly as promised, and is presently approaching the outskirts of Zaporizhia,” he observed, while a servant presented Narcissa with tea.</p><p>She took it and cupped it in her hands. “Mister President, I had great confidence that Bellatrix would prove committed to our cause when she began her overture. Thank you.” The reality was, she would have no choice in the matter. The terms might be changed in the future, but for the moment, her family depended on her compliance. For all it committed her to a certain course, after all, it gave her authority over her own people. And that meant Bellatrix. And possibly getting Draco off the front, too. After taking a drink, she wasted no time in signing the document, because while she may now be granted consideration for having eighteen divisions, she was still very much expected to take the agreement as it was written. <em> That was not the kind of matter you bargained on, </em> she thought trenchantly. Not when she was still only the head of a government in exile. It gave her what she needed—the safety of her family. She would find a way to make do with the rest. The ink still wet, she pushed it back over to Nursultan Nazarbayev, who nodded crisply in acknowledgement.</p><p>Narcissa had to maintain a professional reserve, and her life had fortunately prepared her for this. But it was such a strange feeling, that for the first time in decades, she felt a kinship with Bellatrix. Now they were on the same side, now their fates were linked. She had a niece. Bellatrix had a daughter she had to have obligations to, just like it was Draco who had driven her to take this course. Narcissa’s heart soared in a way that it hadn’t in years.</p><p>But now the real challenge began, too. She was in power, and she would have to keep herself that way. Once you took up those reins, you could not let them down, that was obvious to her in this world she saw around her today.</p><p>Still, she couldn’t help but ask. “As for my sister?”</p><p>“You are free to appoint her to any position within the British Army-in-Exile that you see fit,” he answered. “Pursuant to the agreement provided to Madame Black, I have issued an Executive Order providing for the State Prosecution Services to cease investigating any actions taken by her during the course of the war, on Confederal soil, or internationally under statutes of international jurisdiction, or on account of command responsibility. Henceforth, she’s an officer of an allied nation, nothing more.”</p><p>He turned toward the maps, and Narcissa looked also, while thinking about what he had said. Now, projected, Narcissa could see the positions of divisions, corps, Armies. She could see the troops had occupied all of Kherson Oblast on the left bank of the Dnepr. She could see also that they had almost completely occupied Zaporizhia oblast on two lines of advance on the left bank of the Dnepr as well.</p><p>In the south, the front had been smashed wide open. Some of Bellatrix’s troops— <em> her </em> troops, now!--were manoeuvring to cut off Krasnodar and place the Morsmordre troops there in a cauldron against the sea on a broad, strategic scale. Two other columns were pushing north toward Rostov-na-Donu with alacrity. The flanking column on the right had already seized Stavropol and was making time from north of the city toward the northwest, following the main roads.</p><p>In the north, a massive offensive had pushed Russian troops into position to fight for Oryol. There was already heavy fighting in the city, while to the south a hook curved toward the southwest and the Ukrainian frontier. A series of other major thrusts were developing out of Voronezh, one toward Belgorod and one toward the south.</p><p>“This battle has been launched on the same scale as the Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation—Bagration,” he observed. “Now we must guarantee that the operation is exploited as effectively as possible.”</p><p>“I concur completely, Mister President. When will I be able to go to the front to meet with my troops?”</p><p>“When the operation is concluded,” he answered. “We need you here to coordinate, for now, Madame.” He certainly wouldn't take no for an answer.</p><p>“Then let’s begin,” Narcissa spoke matter-of-factly. A simple read of her situation made it plain that the only way through for House Malfoy, was to stay the course... And for her sister and House Black, well. It was time for the youngest to come into her own.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>On the flat and open plains to the northwest of Stavropol and north of Krasnodar, there were few good places to stop an Army, but it was here that the enemy had to stop them, or else the retreat of the rest of Voldemort’s Army from the Volga would be impossible.</p><p>It was always good, Larissa knew, when you forced your enemy to fight on terrain they had not chosen. They were a few klicks west of the village of Yegorlykskaya, where the enemy had drawn their lines where the ground subtly constricted them, just a bit, enough that the railway had dog-legged through this small village instead of taking a shorter route to the east. They could do no better for finding a position to defend.</p><p>The terrain was best to attack to the west, so it was there that the enemy drew up their tanks. They had no time to prepare fixed defences, so they were positioned to fight hull-down in a creekbed which trended to the west northwest, taking advantage of the trees which grew on the shores of the creek for some added cover, though in winter, with the snow carpeting the open plains and the trees bare, they provided a very thin cover indeed.</p><p>Larissa stood on a low copse, with the wind whipping the snow from the grass which was bowing under its weight around her camouflaged boots. She had used her wand to conjure a quick vision, through the sunglasses that protected her eyes from the glare, of the enemy lines, finer than any pair of binoculars. The enemy were disordered and exhausted and had already been hit hard, but they would see the danger soon enough, and take advantage of it.</p><p>Ginny was crouched low in the grass in her fatigues, occasionally glancing up at Larissa, thinking those exact thoughts, too. “Seen enough yet, <em> Princess</em>? We should probably get back into cover!”</p><p>Almost as if to punctuate the words, there was a puff of smoke from the enemy position. Ginny’s eyes glinted, and the redheaded witch leapt to her feet with her wand flying. The <em> Protego </em> she sang out sent the tank shell ricocheting back toward their attackers, embedding in the soil and exploding three hundred metres short.</p><p>“Junior Councillor, can we TAKE COVER!?” Ginny shouted this time.</p><p>“Yes, they have our mark,” Larissa acknowledged, and turned, jogging back below the copse, still standing, while behind them another salvo of shells plummeted down. A flick of her wand as she retreated sent them the same way as the first, but it told the enemy there were wizards there, too, not a doubt of it now, dirt and flame in the air as they ran for cover.</p><p>Around her, in position and ready to go, was the military strength of one of Bellatrix’s brigades in the defected Janissary units now called the ‘Black Guard’. They had the same vehicles as their enemies. To be told apart from the air, skulls, jackdaws, chevrons and mailled fists with swords had started to appear on the tops of the vehicles in the Black Guards. Black flags were painted on their flanks and rears. They stood out against the snow, but it couldn’t be helped, for the sake of preventing ‘friendly fire’.</p><p>But they were reinforced, now. The 27 <sup> th </sup> Division had caught up, since it had not been involved in the fighting for Stavropol or the other cities, just driving flat-out up the Georgian Military Road and then northwest to come in as their reinforcements. Russian and Turkmen tanks were moving up now to support on the left. Larissa could see them as she brushed her jacket off and, screened by the copse, looked to the west. “Thank you, Ginny.”</p><p>“No problem.” Ginny laughed. “You just need to be reminded sometimes that you’re mortal, that’s all. Hermione would be furious if I let you get blasted by a tank shell.”</p><p>“Yeah, I guess she would. At least we’ve got to assume she’s alright, or else all of this,” Larissa waved around them, “wouldn’t be happening.” She started back to the command BTR that held Major Lukachenko, sheltering at the base of the slope, choosing her footing carefully as she descended the slope through the snow, a little spray of it kicked up by their quick movements.</p><p>The Major stepped out to meet them. “Councillor! What did you see about their position?” A desultory fire had opened up from the enemy ranks, but the allied forces refused to divulge the positions of their tanks and artillery by returning fire.</p><p>“Alexandra Rostislavna, they’re hull-down along the creek,” Larissa answered, following her back in, to crouch under the armoured cover of the roof of the BTR, a topographic map of the region spread down in front of them as they both bend over it at the hatch. She marked the positions with her wand, leaving little glowing dots on the map indicating different sizes and types of units, which expanded outwards into miniatures—glowing little magical holograms of little men standing on the map, tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery pieces.</p><p>Alexandra’s eyes flickered across the points on the map, sparing as little time as she could. “ By following the natural line of the terrain—they’ve refused their right flank.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Thirteen klicks southwest from Yegorlykskaya the creek curves back to the northeast…” Alexandra looked up. “Their line is in the form of a bent bow, more curved to the left, less to the right. So, we go in from the left, at the point of inflection, hit the centre. A direct push forward, the western points of their line won’t actually be able to support the centre or fire on the advance.”</p><p>“Advance with the tanks to three hundred metres, and then we apparate into the middle of their lines with our squads? Take them at point-blank?” Larissa’s eyes questioned her compatriot.</p><p>“That’s… A hell of a lot of risk, but what can I say? The tanks will be exposed going forward without wizards on the front, Larissa Sergeivna. They’ll take heavy losses from the enemy wizards.” Alexandra was grimacing.</p><p>Larissa blinked for a moment, thinking hard, and fast. “Call for the divisional artillery of the 27 <sup> th </sup> , we’ll use rockets to keep their heads down until the tanks get close. It’s worth it, General Pronichev will approve it, we can open their entire line here.”</p><p>“Alright. I’ll get on the line.” Alexandra ducked fully inside, and Larissa turned back to Ginny.</p><p>“The orders will come in a few minutes?” Ginny asked.</p><p>“Certainly,” Larissa nodded, walking along the lines. A heavy shelling from the enemy position was starting up, trying to disrupt the attack before it happened, the screams of the shells descending around them and detonating near to their lines sending most of the soldiers and wizards to cover. Larissa, with Ginny at her side, continued to walk down the line.</p><p>Several shells exploded nearby, driving craters into the snowy ground, kicking up flame and smoke, and as Ginny ducked, her wand up, Larissa just checked her chronometer, walking matter-of-factly. Then she paused at the end of the line and turned back. “Battalion! Comrades! In five minutes we are again going over onto the attack! As we have experienced in the last week, the enemy is demoralised and stunned by this turn of events! We have the confidence of victory on our side: The enemy’s air of invincibility has been destroyed and will not return to him again.”</p><p>Another brace of shells slammed down, close enough to splatter dirt, churned to mud with the snow, onto Larissa’s sleeve. She contemptuously flicked it off and turned back to her speech. “There are hundreds of thousands of our civilians ahead of us, who have been enslaved by this enemy, but know that our Army is in the field, fighting for their liberty. This is your hour to make true the promise you gave them when you enlisted, and show to them that Russia will not abandon an inch of her soil, nor a single one of her people, to the clutches of these monsters—Napoleon, Hitler, Voldemort, it’s just one more. <em> Urrah!</em>”</p><p>“<em>URRAH!</em>”</p><p>Larissa walked back along the line, shaking her fist in the air as she returned to the command track to their shouts. “Make yourselves ready, comrades!”</p><p>Alexandra stepped out with one of her signalmen, who repeated the radio signal by holding up flags. As he did, the tanks around them began to move into their jumping off points.</p><p>“Three minutes, Councillor,” she said flatly, her voice denying any tension.</p><p>“Thank you.” Larissa reached for a cigarette, the easy gesture hiding that her mind was racing. She was human, even as a witch, she had fears. But there was nothing to be done for them, not until this war was over. So she had a smoke, and looked confident for the witches and wizards who looked up to her and trusted her to lead them.</p><p>It was all she could do.</p><p>Suddenly, the rain of rockets tore overhead, barely visible. They made no noise by that point except for the solitary crack of their passage at faster than the speed of sound, and that came after they had already hit the ground, beginning to explode in front of them. The cluster munitions were used especially, to make it as hard as possible for the enemy wizards to deflect all of the incoming rounds.</p><p>As the rockets slammed down, the tanks charged across the open ground. For the next ten minutes the ground exploded in front of them, and the tanks drove as fast and hard as they could toward the enemy, with the rockets simply carpeting the ground, obscuring their advance in smoke and flame, laying down a bridge of fire to obscure their advance.</p><p>The wizards on the other side were hardly dead, or even slowed down, by the attacks against them. They were easily deflecting dozens and then hundreds of rockets as the main barrage came down on them. But it kept them <em> distracted. </em> That was all that was necessary.</p><p>Larissa stepped forward to the position of her command squad, eyes fixed on her chrono. She raised her wand. As the last of the rockets vanished, the tanks now came under concentrated fire, both from their opposite number, and from wizards that pitted their strength against the enchantments—now preferred to the electronics of modern tanks, which could not be produced with the disruptions of the war, anyway—good old machinery and a little magic in the heart. The work of people like Hermione’s friend, Andromeda Tonks, and countless other nameless but important wizards like them at the rear.</p><p>Still, some of those tanks exploded, or were transfigurated in ways that instantly killed the soldiers inside. This was a messy business, and in a wizarding war, death could be undignified. Still it must go on; the tanks carried home the attack, the thunder of guns and engines and treads muffled into the snow.</p><p>Then it was time. “BATTALION FORWARD! Apparate to contact!”</p><p>They had spread the image of the enemy position, and so each of them had the job of apparating over a squad, and immediately fighting. In a single moment, with the last of the straggler rockets coming down in their midst, so that they had to defend against their own missiles, the same for the guns of the tanks that were firing into their positions, they were in the midst of the enemy.</p><p>Shock and desperation met them, wild cries of men who realised that they were now facing melee combat close range. A <em> Bombarda </em> quickly destroyed a tank nearby, while Ginny signalled their position, and the fire of their own tanks slacked off. A few sharp applications of binding spells left regular soldiers helpless and allowed Larissa and her command force to take over the rude positions of fallen logs their enemies had previously occupied.</p><p>Around them, magical and materiel combat blinded together into a cacophony of light, sound, violence, and death. And then the tanks tore over the crest of the slope, firing down into their remaining rivals at point-blank, while the Koldovstoretsy took them from the rear. The step was alive with fire, and in the defile of the creek-bed, the bodies stacked or burned from the ferocious combat, the guns of the better part of a brigade of tanks now able to fire in enfilade along the northwest trending line of the creek.</p><p>The combat swirled away from them as they worked their spells, shielding and loosing destructive magic with reckless abandon, until their enemies had been overmatched, and they could turn to exploitation of the situation. Quickly, Larissa was bogged down in the business of commanding the advance. But advance they would, and she had proudly taken Bellatrix Black’s promise to heart: They were going for the Dnepr, and nothing less.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The offensive had certainly lived up to Bellatrix’s reputation for ‘spectacular insanity’. When there was an attempt to halt the advancing columns at a canal south of Zaporizhia, Bellatrix had mustered the wizards loyal to her to simply advance earthen berms, raising chunks of soil and mud out of the water, to create paths down which her tanks could advance under fire.</p><p>Now they stood at the city itself, the ruins, worked over by nuclear warfare and the Morsmordre’s Invasion of the Ukraine. The destruction of the DniproHES dam and hydroelectric station complex to slow the invaders had completed the utter ruination of this once grand industrial area, nuked and then flooded.</p><p>Hermione understood now why Bellatrix’s troops were willing to follow her through so much. It had become obvious in the fighting around Melitopol, and more clear, still, when they had stood on the bank of that canal, and directly under fire, raised the causeways. Bellatrix was <em> always </em> at the front. She superficially lacked a normal human emotion of fear, like Larissa in that sense, but with a manic, frenetic desperation, not the calm, diffident air of the Russian wizarding aristocrat.</p><p>Her fearlessness and willingness to lead from the front—or perhaps lack of ability to imagine anything else!--was what made muggle men follow her, despite the other facets of her reputation. Of course, it also made <em> keeping her alive </em> an incredible chore, as well as simply surviving in her presence as her guard.</p><p>Their current position was at the Zaporizhia East airport, where they were trying to put together a drive to finish bottling up the enemy in the Old City, pinned against the river. They did not need to take the ruins which could grind up an Army, they only needed to shove them into place and hold them there, so that their armoured spearhead could keep driving north toward Dnepropetrovsk.</p><p>Artillery was continuously firing around them. They had brought up the corps-level masses of 155mm self-propelled howitzers. It was natural to place them around the airport. The enemy was firing back, but as they targeted the artillery fire, and sent wizard hunter-killer teams into the heart of the city in quick raids, they knocked out more and more of their batteries. The sound of the guns thundering had become just a dim backdrop to the days that had passed in a blur, the ruined city overlooking the famed island home of the Zaporizhian Sich, burning in a desultory manner to the west.</p><p>Hermione was pulling together casualty reports for the wizards involved in the fighting and sending them out. Bellatrix never cared about any of the paperwork, and Hermione had soon found herself supporting General Dodson in that respect. Drinking tea out of a tin cup, a cigarette curling smoke in an old ashtray they had found, their headquarters was in the control tower of the airport, where despite the fact it was an obvious target, Bellatrix had insisted on it for the view that it gave her.</p><p>She looked out, inscrutable, her arms still fully concealed in glove and engageante. Every so often she would turn the maps, ask a question, look at the position of a unit, and then give an order. There was the look of a caged tiger to her, she wanted to be fighting, when there was so much noise and violence all around.</p><p>Hermione shivered a little, and tore her eyes off Bellatrix. She took another hot gulp of her tea—the heat was long dead in the control tower and it was cold enough to make her want any kind of warmth she could find (she didn’t like thinking about the further implications of that, though)--and then finished off the reports and handed them to Dodson.</p><p>“Sir, the bottom line is, we’ve lost twenty percent of our wizarding strength for the rest of this offensive, when we started at half strength. We’re going to need more reinforcements from MinKol soon, or else we’re just plain going to lose the ability to conduct offensive operations,” Hermione said softly, not wanting to draw Bellatrix’s attention to it until her Chief of Staff had a chance to review it.</p><p>Then, Bellatrix was over her shoulder, pressing down against her. A shiver ran through Hermione’s spine. For a moment, she completely blanked on the report. For the past days, she had slept together with Bellatrix in the command track, at nights and whenever else they had a chance—not making love, the pace was too intense for that, but resting together in the same bed . The other members of the staff made do with tents, but Bellatrix had a bed which folded down in the command track, and with Hermione effectively serving as her bodyguard, and Bellatrix maintaining her obsessed detachment, it had just happened, without any talking, without any planning, without any thinking.</p><p>Almost like it were natural for them to be together. “Colonel Granger,” Bellatrix said, her voice distantly sounding, and then coming sharply into focus as Hermione’s brain jolted her back from her reverie, “can you repeat that please?”</p><p>“...Of course, Ma’am,” Hermione answered formally, and began to go for the papers...</p><p>“ BLUF, Granger?”</p><p>Hermione pursed her lips, her cheeks curling into a flush that reminded her how young she was. Even if hearing Bellatrix use English military acronyms was just <em>weird.</em> Then she forced herself to be professional, and give Bellatrix the summary that she wanted. “We’re at forty percent strength for our wizarding units, Ma’am. We’ll soon lose the ability to conduct offensive operations with adequate coverage for the men. We need reinforcement, especially from MinKol, if we’re going to meet the operational timetable. The next two hundred kilometres we need to cover are a slog, the enemy is moving in reinforcements, and our operational pace is grinding us up.”</p><p>“ Thank you, Granger.” Bellatrix had a distant stare. “Dodson?”</p><p>Her Chief of Staff for the Crimean units stiffened. “She’s right. We can keep on the offensive for now, but Long Range Aviation hasn’t gotten all of the bridges in Dnepropetrovsk, so we’re going to face heavy opposition there.”</p><p>“I’m not asking for help yet. Ask for Long Range Aviation to support us in cleaning up Zaporizhia, if they haven’t got the bridges in Dnepropetrovsk yet, they won’t in time for it to matter. And we need to get our troops moving north, immediately.”</p><p>“Minimising further losses in Zaporizhia won’t be…”</p><p>“I’ll MAKE IT HAPPEN!” Bellatrix shouted at Dodson, and then grinned. “I <em> will </em> ask for help. But on my terms. Get us ready to <em> move, </em> General. Speed matters. Come on, Granger. Let’s finish this shit.”</p><p>Despite all the danger implicit in those words, Hermione found that after two weeks of this insanity, they served only to send a shock of anticipation through her heart. Bellatrix, wild and uncontrolled in the middle of the campaign, was impossibly sexy to her sleep-deprived and caffeine and nicotine overdosed brain.</p><p>And for the moment, that also guaranteed she didn’t have the slightest doubt.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>BLUF -- Anglo-Saxon military acronym for "Bottom Line Up Front".<br/>Enfilade -- a military term meaning to fire, or approach, from the short length of an enemy line. So say if the enemy line was an I, to approach from the top or bottom of the I.<br/>Defilade -- to be protected from enfilade.<br/>Zaporizhian Sich -- the holdfast of the Cossacks of the Ukraine in the 17th century.<br/>Point of Inflection -- where a line changes angle. So in that case, the most exposed point.<br/>klick -- just in case this wasn't clear from before, this is a military abbreviation of "kilometre".<br/>left bank— Looking down from Moskva, so the east side of the Dnepr.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0030"><h2>30. The Dnepr Rapids</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty: The Dnepr Rapids.</p><p> </p><p>They had seen hard fighting in the past few days, and Hermione was as exhausted as she could be. Bellatrix was as brilliant in combat against her former friends as she once had been against Hermione and her friends, and the young witch was thankful for that. She was glad to see the skills and talents of this past generation of the ‘finest witch of her age’ put to the use of humiliating the forces of the Morsmordre.</p><p>Their troops had slogged north through declining weather conditions while Bellatrix had at times coordinated and at times argued with CIS army staff over comms. She was under more pressure as her offensive slowed down, and it was reflected in the way that both of them were tired and haggard. The past weeks had been like an unstoppable roller coaster.</p><p>The thick mud at the bottom of the Dniprovs’ke reservoir was covered with ice and snow. Once it had been a lake, but the war had put an end to that. This was the position of just the latest attempt of the enemy to put together a stop-line, to the west of Ternovka, where a flanking valley of the Dnepr had once been inundated. Once, this place had been called the Dnepr Rapids, the long stretch of the Dnepr between the modern cities of Zaporizhia and Dnepropetrovsk where the river had descended through portage after portage, rapids after rapids. Once, it had teemed with life, both human and magical, but the magical inhabitants of the Dnepr were gone now—pollution, human intrusion, even the radiation of Chernobyl was buried in that mud, and all of that had been let out by the destruction of the dams. The river had not frozen solid, though. It was too mighty for that. In the distance to her left, Hermione could still see water roaring over rocks in the restored rapids, throwing up spray that froze into strange shapes, into growing frazil ice in the river. It was beautiful, but as cold and silent as the tomb. <em> Perhaps one day, though, it will mean the life comes back. </em></p><p>It had not been easy going to get this far. With the need to finish off resistance in Zaporizhia, and then push north, they had only made thirty-two klicks from the airport for their newest front line. The village of Slavgorod to the east on the railway line marked the outer edge of their line, but there was no attempt to flank them or counterattack, the enemy simply didn’t have the troops for it.</p><p>It was snowing, hard. It made it more difficult, still, to see the bottom of the formerly flooded valley. The temperatures were ferociously cold. It was dipping down toward - 2 0C, w ith the night promising to be even colder. With the wind screaming across the steppe, it felt much colder. Next to her, Bellatrix looked haunted, with her eyes drawn and her pale skin battered by the wind, looking tiny in the massive coat buttoned and belted around her.</p><p>Then a smile came to her face again. “They think they’re so strong, but they’re not. They’re the wind-blown remnants of an Army.”</p><p>Hermione couldn’t help but laugh, somewhere between real amusement and sleep exhaustion. “ We’re all wind-blown at the moment, Bellatrix.” They were running too far behind, and for all of Bellatrix’s contempt at the positions they had just surveyed, the terrain made an attack very difficult to organise. Driving tanks across the partially frozen sludge at the bottom of the reservoir was a dangerous endeavour for an attack, if the ice crust on the surface failed.</p><p>The sun was fast fading from the sky. Bellatrix turned away, giving up on trying to see more of the dim and obscured enemy positions in the failing light. Hermione paced her, walking back to the command track.</p><p>Hermione grabbed the next day’s met forecast from the cluster of command tents, which they were trying to keep warm with trailer-mounted diesel heaters. It was not that much of a change. Then she fell back in with Bellatrix, reading through the report.</p><p>“Clear skies up to ten thousand metres, maximum wind speed of fifteen km/h, initial temperature of -35C rising to -15C by fifteen hundred hours,” she summarised, just to have Bellatrix yank the file out of her hands and read it herself.</p><p>“...Bella?” She hazarded, now that they were alone. The command track they rode in was secured, and Bellatrix unlocked it; when they arrived at position, all communications were handled from tents and other vehicles, because Bellatrix’s personal command track had the telecaster in it, and leaving a telecaster unsupervised was essentially unacceptable, even though the previous user had to voluntarily release it to the next.</p><p>“That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. A day that’s a blessing to us,” Bella laughed. “My luck holds! Come on, Granger,” she bounded inside before it got cold, short enough that the vehicle wasn’t too uncomfortable for her.</p><p>Inside, the telecaster sat with a magic light glowing above it. Sometimes it spun idly, nobody could say why, but perhaps it was the magical energy of all the ensorcelled people that it was controlling. The cloudy not-quite-water of the memories it had collected was dim and eerie, in the basin of the pensieve in which it sat. Hermione hoped that soon the telecaster would be separated from the pensieve, that the people would be free, that she could possibly have a chance to study a telecaster that wasn’t being used for such an ill purpose.</p><p>She was desperately guilty about all of the enslaved people they were forcing to fight in the heat of the moment. She was guilty about the fact that her own government very much did not intend to force Bellatrix to let them go until the end of the offensive. They were needed on the front line. They were needed to <em> win. </em> So still they fought.</p><p>Hermione hoped they knew they fought for a far better cause than before. But she couldn’t dupe herself into believing it was really equivalent to simply being conscripted, because it wasn’t. She dogged the hatch behind them. Bellatrix had enchanted a fireless flame in the middle of the vehicle which kept it warm even when it wasn’t running, and the flood of heat back into her body made her feel guilty for the soldiers who, on that night, in the heat of combat, would have no warmth as the temperatures dipped down to -35C through the night as the storm eased off.</p><p>Bellatrix stood before the telecaster now, and with her wand out toward it, it spun. She did not give orders to the Army, however. The magic of the telecaster was subtle, and it could force the trained men of the ensorcelled Army to follow general orders; it was not necessary to micromanage operations through it. Instead, she was using it for its second function. As she completed the non-verbal spell, the spinning telecaster projected a ghostly three-dimensional image of Lady Minister Tamar Dadiani, who had access to the Telecaster with the Black Guard—Bellatrix’s other Army. A similar image of Bellatrix would be mirrored for Lady Tamar.</p><p>“Minister.”</p><p>“Madame Black,” Tamar acknowledged.</p><p>“The met forecast for the Dnepr Rapids region tomorrow is excellent. I want you to reach out to Astana and confirm the operation will be executed. It’s our chance to turn the line, before they throw more troops into Dnepropetrovsk,” Bellatrix said with a tired pride, a gleam in her eyes that showed her feeling of triumph. “ The drop zone that was identified between Pavlovka and Vasilovka will work nicely—AB, I believe it was.”</p><p>“AB,” Tamar acknowledged. “Well, we’re only going to get one throw of this bolt, Madame Black. Are you sure it will be enough?”</p><p>“I will make it enough,” Bellatrix’s lips curled into a confident sneer. “I will <em> make </em> it enough. The weather has been so bad, we could not execute it before, but now is our chance, and with those troops in place, we will be able to finish the job and catch up to our timetable. Get it done, Lady Tamar, if we’re going to win the greatest victory in this war. Get it done.”</p><p>“They’ll jump at dawn tomorrow.”</p><p>“Thank you, Lady Minister. I’ll see you on the other side!” Bellatrix grinned brightly, swayed her hips with a little wave of her hand before deactivating the telecaster, and then slapping her hands together.</p><p>The ruthless but childlike glee was a reminder of the fact that Hermione was sleeping with, charitably, a madwoman. For all that, the sway of her hips was a reminder of just how sexy, how beautiful Bellatrix was. Hermione, now warm, paused in the act of having removed her coat and boots. She was also impressed because Bella really was asking for help. Really had coordinated something. “VDV insertion,” she asked the older witch, bent over and looking up.</p><p>“Of course. We’ll turn their flank with the airborne,” Bella answered lightly, her eyes gleaming. “I <em> told you </em> I was capable of asking for help, Granger. I just needed to make sure it was still a situation I could control, still a situation that would meet the terms of my promise to the Confederation. That’s done. If they land there in good weather tomorrow – we’ll be at Dnepropetrovsk the same day. And then I’ve got a plan for <em> that, </em> too.”</p><p>“Are you going to tell me?” Hermione asked, feeling flippant with the older woman. “Or am I supposed to just be awed by your improvisational cleverness?”</p><p>“I don’t know, muddy, maybe you’re just supposed to assume I’m intelligent,” Bellatrix snarked back as she stepped closer to the little fold down bed, tossing her massive coat over one of the seats along the way.</p><p>Hermione was about to open her mouth to resist the slur when Bella kissed her fully on the lips. Bella pushed her back down onto the bed, and dropped to her knees in front of the younger witch, pushing her back firmly into the shock padding along the wall. Her gloved fingers snapped at the buttons of Hermione’s trousers.</p><p>“I need to shut you up more often,” she muttered, as Hermione stared down at her in blank shock.</p><p><em> I should have realised the anticipation of victory was making her horny. Oh God. </em> Hermione sucked in her breath. For a moment, there was a war in her mind between need and lust, and the feeling of anger at Bella using slurs on her again. But Bella was <em> there, </em> those black curls fell down across her thighs as the older woman insistently tugged at her trousers and panties in one go.</p><p>Hermione mustered the will to resist, and then it melted away. She wanted this, she needed it, wasn’t it her reward for putting up with this madwoman anyway?</p><p>This wildly attractive madwoman. Hermione bit her lip and then finished helping with her clothes. She was naked a moment later; two pairs of hands did not take long to finish stripping her simple and practical clothes.</p><p>As before, Bella was still fully clothed. Hermione wasn’t really sure what to think of that, other than the fact that she still hadn’t seen the Dark Witch fully nude. “Bella, do you want help with your clothes…?”</p><p>Instead, Bella hooked her legs over her shoulders, and looked up with a grin. “Oh, no thank you. It’s colder close to the floor,” she said with a mild bemusement which nonetheless make sparks shoot up through Hermione’s spine.</p><p>Then, Bella traced a line of kisses down each of her inner thighs in turn, closer and closer to her centre. Her hands braced firmly on Hermione’s hips, the young witch felt steady enough above Bella to run her hands through her hair, that endless mass of dark curls, streaked with white, that only magic kept untangled, especially in the field.</p><p>For a moment, with Hermione’s fingers massaging her scalp, Bella pushed her face down against the younger woman’s thighs and moaned as if that feeling alone were good enough to be erotic, maybe it was. Then her lips planted a kiss, and her tongue licked a trail which didn’t end until it buried itself in the patch of fur between Hermione’s legs.</p><p><em> She </em> <em> really </em> <em> likes have her scalp— </em> the thought disappeared midway through. Hermione’s running cynical monologue on life couldn’t handle what Bella was doing to her at the moment.</p><p>Bella’s tongue spent time teasing her, stroking across her outer folds until Hermione, propped up and straddling the older witch’s shoulders, couldn’t keep her legs still, she wanted to twitch, her muscles wanted to move. She took a shuddering breath, and Bella, taking it for exactly what she wanted, dove her tongue right for Hermione’s clit.</p><p>Hermione’s gasp seemed to be exactly what Bella had wanted to hear. After getting her going, she went back to teasing again, but licking at the flesh around her clit, closer in, getting her more worked up while letting the brief shock settle. Bella was totally in control, she could do whatever she wanted to Hermione in that moment and the young witch knew she wouldn’t resist, didn’t care, it didn’t matter. But for all that, Bella was totally focused on <em> her </em> pleasure.</p><p>Now Bella’s tongue returned to where it had been before, so that Hermione’s pleasure only increased. She couldn’t understand Bella sometimes, but, it didn’t matter. She was amazing. The inherent ridiculousness of being tossed against an armoured wall inside of a combat vehicle, her arse firmly planted on a metal shelf of a cot, her thighs thrown up over a shorter woman’s shoulders – it wasn’t like the first time, it wasn’t like the Hotel Taurica, it was a little ridiculous, it wasn’t everything Hermione wanted, but it was everything she needed, right then, right there.</p><p>Bella had gotten a handle on how to pleasure Hermione faster and with more confidence than Hermione had Bella, that was for sure. The younger witch’s legs twitched and her heels bounced on the older woman’s corset, and the tongue between her legs stroked her clit with gentle but fast presses of soft flesh.</p><p>Hermione came, her hips bucking out against Bella’s face, thighs riding on her shoulders, the pleasure of being held firmly into place against the twitch of her muscles by those two gloved hands on her hips heightening the moment, as Bella held her firmly, and didn’t let her body move despite her impulsive efforts to. She shuddered, and heaved a soft moan.</p><p>Bella pressed her lips against Hermione and laughed into her softest flesh. “Can’t get enough of me, can you?” Her muffled voice vibrated into Hermione. It had been short and intense, with no real foreplay, but then again, they were having sex on the battlefield in the middle of a war, inside of an armoured vehicle.</p><p>Everything was crazy, her life was this wild rid e now, and Hermione reached down and began to rub Bella’s scalp. The older woman sighed and leaned her head into one of Hermione’s thighs as the younger witch relaxed and slowly came down off her high.</p><p>There wasn’t enough room to have sex on the glorified cot. There was barely enough room for the two of them to sleep, tangled together, and it was good they were both comfortable like that. After enjoying the indulgence of having her scalp massaged by Hermione for a few minutes, Bella rose and gently tugged Hermione to the side, shrugging the young woman off of her shoulders.</p><p>She pulled herself up onto the cot to sit there, and kiss Hermione from the side, first on her cheeks, and then her lips, delicately, sucking in her breath. Bella hiked up her skirts and petticoats and shoved her panties down to hang about her knees, eyes heady with want as she grabbed one of Hermione’s hands, and shoved it between her legs.</p><p>Hermione obligingly pushed her fingers close, and leaned over to kiss the older woman again. “Bella, why won’t you…” <em> Take off your clothes in front of me, </em> she wanted to say, but Bella kissed her firmly, her eyes demanding the subject leave them.</p><p>So, instead, Hermione rolled over on top of Bella, straddling her lap and rubbing with her fingers across the other woman’s curly <em> lower </em> hair, which she could only fantasize about, not even having seen yet in their love-making. In a way, it was wildly erotic. Positioned like that, she defiantly pressed her own breasts against Bella’s corset and kissed her firmly on the lips.</p><p>The other woman’s eyes were wide for a moment as Hermione moved, and then her tongue lavishly duelled with the younger witch’s, her back pressed into the padding and steel, uncaring, needy, quickly settling herself to be comfortable, hips tensed, with Hermione atop her, the piles of puffed up layers of skirts pushed out of the way, wrapping like satin around her bare knees.</p><p>Hermione gained in confidence with the strokes of her fingers across Bella’s folds, her hood, finding her clit below it. Here, now, she could see the other woman squirming below her, pleasured by her, she wasn’t literally buried in the skirts but rose above them. And she felt more confident with her fingers than her tongue.</p><p>She could time by the twitching of Bella’s hips just how well she was doing, as her tongue insistently duelled and played with Bella’s, the older woman’s sometimes getting the better of her and pushing into her own mouth. There was an element of struggle in everything Bella did, and Hermione loved it.</p><p>And then the elder witch’s hips grew taut, the gentle rolling pressure of Hermione’s fingers quickened, and an explosive exhale of a moan into her lips told Hermione everything she wished to know, as the pureblood under her bucked her hips, and Hermione pressed close. Finally, she broke the kiss to whisper in Bella’s ear, “so, doing better? Going to let me see you naked someday?”</p><p>“Mmmmnn..” Bellatrix refused to answer, but the sound seemed contented. Hasty, needy, but with absolutely no regrets.</p><p>Still, she avoided answering the question.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>They woke up well before dawn, of course. It was winter, and the dawn came late. Hermione stirred, to find that Bellatrix was already using a heating spell to boil their tea. She was fully dressed and, as usual, had probably used magic to make herself up in the morning. For a pureblood that was nothing, a normal part of the routine, just waking up, and it meant she only had to splash her face with some of the water, melted from snow.</p><p>Hermione groaned softly and stirred in bed. She found herself with tea with condensed milk, and a hard biscuit to dip in it. “Thank you for the boil- up,” she bobbed her head.</p><p>“You just need to get ready, Granger,” Bellatrix answered, looking at her a bit askance, a bit pensive, as she cupped her own tea mug in her hands. “Today will be exciting.”</p><p>Hermione pursed her lips and soaked the biscuit in the tea to take bites of it. “Well, thank you nonetheless. Bella, why won’t you let me see you naked?”</p><p>Bellatrix stopped short and looked up. “First of all, Granger, don’t call me that. Second of all, because I don’t want to? I like to think that’s a good enough reason right there. Third of all, you aren’t so pathetic that you seriously think this is going to <em> last, </em> do you? Do you think I’m going to parade around in front of my <em> sister </em> with a <em> mudslut </em> on my arm? I did this for the sake of my family. What in Merlin’s name would I <em> tell my daughter </em> if she saw the two of us together? You’re being ridiculous.”</p><p>“I want you to apologise for calling me that word <em> right this instant.” </em> Hermione pointed at her bare left arm. “You put a slur into my skin already, and I’m ashamed of that, but I’ve let you see your own handiwork every time we’ve had sex now, and you … What, you’d let me see you if you still had the Morsmordre on your arm, but not because you’ve had it cut off? And Delphini? God, Bellatrix, she’s a half-blood herself. We all know <em> Riddle</em>’s origin story now, you can’t hide it. You make out like the Naryshkin family was degenerate for marrying muggle aristocrats but they’re just as fine as Voldemort by that standard—and your own daughter! How hypocritical are you going to be, Bellatrix? We just had sex last night!”</p><p>Bella glared at Hermione over the top of her teacup.</p><p>“You can’t say that you’re just trying to cheer me up before a suicide mission now. It isn’t that bad anymore. You wanted last night,” Hermione continued, trembling as she spoke, with the intensity of the emotion. “You wanted <em> me </em> last night. Sometimes, I wonder if you wanted me that night in the Malfoy Manor, even…”</p><p>Bella’s lips curled into a sneer. “I’m not a rapist,” she answered. “And don’t ever think again about insulting my daughter. Delphini Black will be the next scion of the House. My daughter is <em> pure.</em>”</p><p>“<em>How </em> is it an insult from a <em> mudblood," </em> she mockingly sneered the slur in her arm, trying to be brave, "to simply state the objective fact that Voldemort and by extension his daughter are half-bloods? What is she going to think when she finds that out? She’s as smart and capable as you are, I’m sure. It will crush her to find out.”</p><p>Bellatrix just glared at her, and Hermione quickly went to finish dressing, with the biscuit and the tea in her stomach. That was enough. They needed to get out, to take charge of the situation, to not argue in the middle of a command track. There was a sigh, though. Hermione desperately wanted to confront Bellatrix, she wanted the woman to recognise her, to apologise. But duty forced her to let it drop with Bella’s glare, to leave the words unspoken, to carry on instead.</p><p>Bellatrix firmly buckled on the coat over her more elaborate clothes, and partially tamed her curls beneath a floppy, thick, warm cap. It was <em> really </em> cold; she wrapped a scarf in Slytherin colours around her neck, which she had somewhere in her bag, and pulled on wool leggings before putting on her boots. Hermione, bound to the woman, acknowledged a small bit of happiness that Bellatrix was at least taking her health in the winter weather seriously. The younger witch, for her part, had on the full ensemble of a winter combat uniform from hat to insulated boots.</p><p>Then, together, they headed to the command tents, surrounded by the small trailer mounted diesel engines which did nothing but heat air and run fans to blow it through flexible trunks into the inside of the command tents, continuously. They created a cloud of smog that quickly condensed to ice crystals on their clothes as they walked through it, their breath roiling as vapour in the pre-dawn dark. And all of that, walking a few hundred feet into the relative warmth of the tent, where more hot tea was waiting, as well as bowls prepared from the ration packs, of baked beans, mutton sausages and crackers. A hearty enough breakfast from the janissary rations, but Hermione missed the Russian field kitchens. For now, a cold silence prevailed between the two women, and Bellatrix went to take her report from General Dodson.</p><p>A few minutes later they both returned, Bellatrix putting aside her empty bowl and looking to Hermione. “Well, they’re coming in from the southeast, just a few minutes now, and then it will begin. I want to watch. Stand to, Councillor.”</p><p>“Of course, Ma’am,” Hermione answered formally, and insisted on tipping a salute as she followed Bellatrix back out into the cold. Now they could see the scene of tents and vehicles, troops moving in uniform and taking positions. The Rooks went in first, providing final suppression, though they had battered the Morsmordre forces in the area so heavily, and with so much magic in use, that the electronics for anti-aircraft missiles were largely ineffective. To have the range for this operation, they were operating out of rough fields near Voronezh.</p><p>There were twenty-two of them, sweeping in two crossing waves across the site of the landing, only minutes before. They used information from Bellatrix’s army to target the remaining anti-air assets, chaff and flares spewing from them as they crossed over their targets, firing salvoes of rockets as they moved in at low altitude. A few attacked close enough that Hermione could see the puffs of smoke from their guns firing, but the clatter of everything that could face skyward in the enemy army trying to hit them obscured the sound of their own attack; only the rockets detonating rippled to them, and the roars of the jets in the clear air after they had already passed by.</p><p>And then one of the officers near them pointed up to the east, coming out of the rising sun, to protect them for as long as possible, when they lined up on their final approaches, while smoke and flame still roiled across the battlefield to the north, then it was to the northeast on open ground that the enemy couldn’t cover, that they were coming in, and aiming for open wheat fields, now covered in snow, where they would have enough time to mount their vehicles and swing out into action before the enemy could respond. “There they come!”</p><p>A squadron of attack helicopters attached to Bellatrix’s Army now swept across the field to the west of the landing zone, making a final run to check for surviving missile batteries. The artillery supporting her troops opened fire with special smoke-producing white phosphorous rounds to mark a line of smoke across the field to further obscure targeting of the landing zone, though the big Ilyushins were at high enough altitude that it would not really help.</p><p>The important thing was that it was not necessary to disable all of the anti-air firepower in the enemy Army. It was only necessary to target the long-range missiles. The Landing Zone was outside of the slant range of the other weapons, and though they tried to fire a few Rapier SAMs, they didn’t have the range. One of the helicopters <em> did </em> go down, but that was an acceptable sacrifice in war, keeping the enemy distracted. The Rooks came back for another set of passes to the west, with the same objective. The pilots of those birds knew that they might sacrifice their lives by exposing themselves to the anti-air of the enemy, and that this was worth it if it kept one of the massive Il-76s from being shot down before the desantniki could debouche.</p><p>Then the ‘bouquets’, the parachutes of the men, began to blossom in the sky above, first hundreds and then thousands, off to their northeast. The lines of men leaping into the bitterly cold air and activating their parachutes were silhouetted in the light of the rising sun. With them went jeeps, and armoured vehicles, too, the BMDs of the VDV, the Russian Airborne Forces.</p><p>One of the Rooks briefly distracted Hermione as it flew overhead at low altitude, trailing smoke from missile damage. She breathed a wish for the safety of the pilot and turned her attention back to the awesome sight of the deploying of a full strength Airborne Division. As the vehicles--ejected from the back ramps of the Ilyushins on pallets—neared the ground, rods extending from them came in contact with the snow and earth first, and triggered powerful rockets attached to the parachute assembly which slowed them for a safe landing.</p><p>Cases of heavier weapons went down, too. Men cleared their parachutes and raced to these as fast as they could, opening them and readying man-portable missiles, mortars and heavy machine guns. Jeeps, which landed with men, raced across the field to deliver troops to the BMDs, and soon, an entire mechanized force would be on the move.</p><p>“General Dodson! Shift to counterbattery fire and bring the men to the final jumping-off points! We will coordinate our attack with the VDV.” Bellatrix turned to shout, and when he acknowledged the orders with a salute, she stepped up to Hermione’s side, grinning with an almost lustful anticipation.</p><p>Her wand was in her hand, and the smile on her face was a grin as uneasily sadistic as it had always been with Bellatrix at her worst. “Now, Granger, we get to have fun.”</p><p>The airborne were swinging into the attack as their Army prepared to renew its own attack. Stepping forward, Bellatrix cast the first powerful spell that would blast a carpet of crushed rock down across the approach for the mud-filled valley. Here, where the Dnepr Rapids roared through building ice, she would again use magic to create bridges for her Army, and now the enemy <em> could not </em> be ready for them, for they were being hit in their flank.</p><p>Hermione saw, clearly, the victory almost already in hand at the moment the battle had started. And for all the confusion, uncertainty, and insanity in her life at that hour, she was damned glad Bellatrix was on their side, whatever madness that it was.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dnepr Rapids--the rapids of the Dnepr (or Dnipro, or Dnieper) river between Zaporizhia and Dnepropetrovsk (renamed Dnipro by the modern Ukrainian government) were a famous obstacle to the trade and raiding route of the Varangians from north to south, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Drowned by dams, the sediment would be filled with radioactive material from Chernobyl and all the old chemicals from Soviet industrialisation efforts, but still the restoration of these ancient rapids, where the Cossacks had their holdfasts and armies of horses once crossed to raid Europe, would offer some hope for the future in natural terms--while being a terrible blow to the Ukraine in economic terms.<br/>VDV -- Воздушно-десантные войска России, the Airborne Forces of the Russian Federation (with the same acronym serving for most of the other successor states as well). Due to the difficulty of maintaining airborne forces in the circumstances, these are almost certainly mixed units with contingents from the other CIS powers.<br/>BMD -- Боевая Машина Десанта, translating to "Airborne Forces Combat Vehicle", specialist light tanks of the VDV with a main armament of 100mm cannons. A related vehicle designated the BTR-D in the west is used as an APC by the VDV (did I mention ALL militaries, of all countries, love acronyms? Because they do!).<br/>Ilyushin, Il-76 -- Primary high-wing, T-tail, 4-engine heavy transport plane of the Russian Armed Forces, used by many other countries. Noteworthy for the old-style glassed-in nose and very distinctive; NATO reporting name "Candid".<br/>Desantniki -- I use this word because it is not a translation of the English "paratrooper" or an equivalent, but means in Russian "one who desants", and desant is actually a French word, meaning "disembark". So it really means "Those who disembark airplanes", which sounds innocuous until you remember that they disembark them in the middle of the sky. :-)</p><p>A few comments on Bella and Hermione: Their relationship at the moment is born of stress and an attraction that they are both having trouble with, albeit for very different reasons. This is a little tough because true love and respect are not there yet.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0031"><h2>31. The Dragons</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-One: The Dragons.</p><p> </p><p>By the next day after the airborne operation, their army was on the outskirts of Dnepropetrovsk. Between the VDV division and Bellatrix’s Army, the defenders had easily been crushed and thrown back, but now the Morsmordre was bringing up more troops at Dnepropetrovsk. Despite everything, or perhaps especially because of it, they were planning on making a fight to retain control of part of the left bank of the Dnepr.</p><p>And that meant Bellatrix was vibrating like a coiled spring, intent that she should keep her promise in full and drive them back. Anyway, she had her orders, she <em> knew </em> it was expected, they wanted her to meet up with the force attacking south which had just, according to the updates that morning, liberated Sumy. That meant that Bellatrix badly, badly needed to force her way through left-bank Dnepropetrovsk and the associated northern suburbs. And it left Hermione wondering if she was going to be witness to an absolute effusion of blood, driven solely by Bellatrix’s paranoia.</p><p>She immediately regretted it the moment that she thought it. Bellatrix was being pushed by real orders from above. The Confederation wanted the Morsmordre driven back as far as they possibly could, they wanted the Dnepr on its whole length. Bella <em> was </em> under pressure, and Hermione, honestly, wasn’t sure if they really would renege if she failed to meet her intemperate boast.</p><p>As the days wore by, the temperature kept falling. It was -40C outside, the crossover point between Celsius and Fahrenheit, where both were equal to -40. That had been one of those facts Hermione had learned before going to Hogwarts, that stuck with her and came back now. She felt so different from that long, frizzyhaired know-it-all that it seemed like a dream. But the facts stayed with her.</p><p>The met reports seemed to contain more news of it being really cold every day. Sure, Hermione had already known the effects of the nuclear winter, and also how the worst predictions had mercifully not come true. But the Sea of Azov was already frozen in, even the largest rivers were freezing up. This winter was going to be a particularly bad one. It might, in fact, be worse than the legendary Winter of 1709, which Hermione had read about in a day and age when she never expected to live through its rival.</p><p>The heat generators were having trouble keeping up; it was 10C inside of the command tent. This was, of course, better than not having them at all. The air had no moisture, and she had only woken up two hours before but was feeling dehydrated. She went to get some more tea, and grabbed a second cup for Bellatrix, who was standing over the maps, detached and almost disassociated, occasionally issuing an order.</p><p>When Hermione approached and thrust the mug to her, Bella blinked and turned. The tea, with a draught of condensed milk, swirled, brown, in the cup, and for the briefest of a moment, Hermione thought she saw thanks flash through Bella’s eyes. “You need liquid, Ma’am. This air will tear the water from your lungs.”</p><p>After a beat of silence, Bella smiled faintly. “Thank you, Granger.”</p><p>For some reason, that casual politeness, even with her surname, made Hermione beam. “You’re welcome.” <em> God, it’s turning into the Stockholm syndrome. I’m happy when she doesn’t insult me. </em></p><p>“You remember that second plan I had,” Bellatrix began to speak unprompted, drinking quickly of her tea, taking long draughts of it to heat her stomach. “I believe it’s time for it, so we can punch through Dnepropetrovsk as fast as possible, with a minimum of casualties. We’ll go together. ”</p><p>“What’s the plan?” Hermione pursed her lips above her steaming cuppa.</p><p>“We don’t get caught up in the thinking of idiots and morons who have become fixed to the idea that a witch or wizard is just an artillery battery in the form of a person. Or maybe if you’re me, a battalion.” Bella couldn’t help the smirk. “So instead, we’re going to use magic in a way that changes the game completely.”</p><p>Hermione waited, patiently smiling, rather than answer Bella. She wanted to see if that got a positive response, and…</p><p>Managed to hide her grin when Bellatrix continued speaking.</p><p>“There’s a sanctuary for Ukrainian Ironbellies to the northeast of Dnepropetrovsk…”</p><p>The grin she managed to hide quickly disappeared.</p><p>“I believe you have some experience with Ukrainian Ironbellies,” Bellatrix continued, now a little bit snidely.</p><p>Hermione remembered Gringotts. She remembered <em> being </em> Bella, physically, for one day of her life. The look was painted on her face, now. They had succeeded, but the Gringotts heist had not exactly been easy. Sometimes, Hermione still had nightmares about it, among other things. “A <em> little bit,</em>” she forced herself to answer, stiffening up. “You want to lure the dragons into attacking the enemy positions in the city, don’t you?”</p><p>“Precisely,” Bella grinned, and blatantly ignored how uncomfortable Hermione was. “Dragons have been used in war from time to time in the past, and they’re nearby, and available since of course in the middle of the fighting there’s nobody to stop us .”</p><p>“Nobody to stop us… Most dragons are endangered species,” Hermione protested weakly.</p><p>“They’ll be <em> fine. </em> Come on. I need you there.” Bellatrix reached up to tug on the collar of her coat with her free hand, hanging loose, drowning her it was so massive. She finished her mug of tea quickly, and laughed. “Of course, I could order you…”</p><p>“I’m going,” Hermione stiffened. “Apparate? I assume we don’t want to scare the dragons.”</p><p>“Of course we’ll apparate. I get tired of all these muggle contraptions… I suppose you think I actually like flying on helicopters or some kind of bloody rot like that.” She turned and pitched her voice. “General Dodson, you have command until I return. Order the Anti-Air forces to ignore slow-moving contacts coming from the northeast for the rest of today. I have a little surprise to lay on for our friends!”</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Larissa and Ginny had, with their unit, fought their way to Kirovskiy Raion—to the east bank of the Don in Rostov-na-Donu. There were no bridges for 200km to the northeast so effectively made a flank attack by the Morsmordre forces east of the Don impossible against Bellatrix’s Army; none of them would be able to retreat in time or get in position for it. They were all being funnelled north, toward Kharkov, not through the Donbass, and their line of retreat toward Kharkov was also badly threatened, the route extremely long and now under constant attack. It was not quite a cauldron, yet, but the shape could be discerned.</p><p>Assaulting Rostov, on the other hand, was another matter. There were entirely ensorcelled troops facing them here, essentially a sacrifice to slow them down. But with the mighty River Don between them and the city, and a crossing necessary to effect the assault, there were no guarantees.</p><p>Larissa felt the temperatures, which had continued to fall here. Once the Sea of Azov had frozen over, the temperature had dropped further, and now in the morning, it was -30C, and from ushanka, greatcoat, leggings, wool trousers, boots, her long jumpers trying to fight the chill. The hot boiled tea helped, bitter and sharp and sweetened with a single spoon of preserves.</p><p>Ginny had to take a spoon and chop off some of the evaporated milk with it. It had, of course, frozen. The two were huddled in an abandoned house to the east of the main crossings, the windows gone from a nuke that had detonated years ago. It was rotting, mildewing, and still had the debris of someone’s life in it. It was out of the wind, so it was worth it. Other troops from the battalion were in the houses around them, waiting. The river was only a few dozen yards away. By the bank, it was already frozen, and here where the current was slower on a side channel, almost all the rest was, too.</p><p>“How long do you think it will be until the hovercraft come up?”</p><p>“They should have already been here,” Larissa sighed. “More delays. But we’ll have to be ready to apparate within minutes when they do arrive, so no chance of standing down.”</p><p>“Yeah.” Ginny shook her head. “Merlin, it’s been… Weeks, it’s almost Christmas, well, our Christmas anyway, and that entire time, Hermione has been stuck with Bellatrix Le-Black. And we haven’t heard from her the entire time.”</p><p>“No functional post office with Black’s Army yet,” Larissa shrugged ruefully. “What to do about, Ginny? I’m sure she’s fine.”</p><p>“I’m not.” Ginny was pensive as she gulped her tea. “ Bellatrix was the one who tortured her, I want to make that absolutely clear. The left arm she won’t show anyone? That’s got the slur ‘Mudblood’ carved in it. Honestly, she probably wouldn’t want me to tell you, ugh, it makes me want to wash my mouth out just to have repeated it. But I need to talk about it. Because you’re just as close to her as I am, now. And I don’t know what it’s going to be like for her to be around Bellatrix that much, maybe for the rest of her life. It seemed like a desperate gamble that was going to fail, but now I can see the beginning of something that’s going to succeed, that we’re actually going to win. And that means Hermione… Is pretty much stuck playing cover for Bellatrix the rest of her life. The woman who tortured her. Who will <em> never </em> face justice for it. For anything, including killing Harry’s Godfather. Her own cousin, I might add. ”</p><p>“I don’t like thinking about it, but I also have faith that Mione will make the best of it,” Larissa began to pace. “If anyone can, she can. Even when she’s lost the ability to see the best in herself, she proves it by continuing to see the best in others, and be practical, and always learning more. Her books told her it was a good strategy, and she was resolute in following through about that… What you just told me confirms that for me. She faced that woman down and said ‘yes, I will chain my fate to your’s, so that others may live’.”</p><p>“I <em> know, </em> but she’s <em> my friend, </em> and I want her to be <em> happy, </em> Lara! Heroine, she’s already got that covered, even if she would never admit it in a million years after the Battle of Hogwarts. But happiness? She actively denies herself now. I don’t know what would break her out of that."</p><p>“She doesn’t seem <em> uninterested </em> in dating,” Larissa suggested, leaning out the window with her wand to use a spell that would magnify part of her distant vision. “Let’s win the war, she’ll find someone. Ideally, someone who can set boundaries with Bellatrix.”</p><p>“That would be one hell of a witch,” Ginny sighed. “Do you see something?”</p><p>“Yes, they’re coming in now. We should turn out the men,” Larissa nodded. The big Zubr combat hovercraft were part of the Black Sea Fleet, and with Bellatrix’s defection and the enemy fleet switching sides, they had been able to cross the frozen Sea of Azov, and come up over the flat farmland to the south, to bypass the enemy gun positions on the opposite bank near the city of Azov.</p><p>“I remember father taking us on a hovercraft when I was little—one of the ones that went across the Channel.”</p><p>“God, a British hovercraft? Did it catch on fire? Why not just apparate…”</p><p>“Oh, shut your mouth, Lara! It was a perfectly fine journey. Da’ just wanted to show us muggle things.” Ginny paused. “How are we going to clear the opposite bank? They’ll be very vulnerable carrying tanks and men across. We’ll apparate ahead of them to cover them, I know, but…”</p><p>Larissa looked at her chrono. It was time. “Well, no hurt in telling you right now. Last night we brought up special detachments of the NBC Protection Troops.”</p><p>“Oh <em> Merlin, </em> we’re going to use a <em> tacnuke </em> on one of our own cities!?” Ginny’s face paled.</p><p>“God, No! Nothing like that. Something much more precise. You see, Russian muggles are very resourceful, when they needed dragon-fire to support combat operations… They made it up.”</p><p>“Buratinos.” Ginny grinned now, too, shook her head. “Sorry, Lara.” Then she flashed a victory sign. “I’ll turn my men out now. See you on the other side, Councillor.” With a tipped salute, the redheaded witch turned away. “Better make sure of that, or I’ll have to tell ‘Mione!”</p><p>Laughing, Larissa started out of the ruins of the house, though the abandoned toys on the floor as she left it brought her grin to a quick halt. Her expression stiffening, she thought it was fortunate she had seen them; they reminded her not to have any mercy or hesitation.</p><p>The heavy thermobaric rocket launchers of the TOS-1 type opened fire five minutes later. Thirty munitions per launcher, thirty launchers—all fired within less than a minute. The munitions created a fuel-air explosive mixture which detonated to collapse buildings all along Beregovaya Street along the waterfront. The massive rippling effect of the detonations compounded the flames, sucking the oxygen from the buildings, generating overpressure, spreading flames, but mostly doing damage by collapsing structures, since the pressure quickly knocked the fire down as soon as it had been established. The effect was still incredible, demolishing several blocks of the city within a single heartbeat as they surged forward, again over onto the attack.</p><p>Then, the hovercraft charged just west of the ruins of the Voroshilovskiy bridge, while just to the east was where Larissa and Hermione apparated with their combat teams. Some of t he flames were still around and ahead of them, cinders wafting through hot air that was a welcome relief from the bitter cold. Their combat engineering vehicles would knock it down and prevent the fire from spreading as they advanced. They were in battle immediately as the conventional artillery followed up.</p><p>Lesson learned. If you didn’t have dragons—get them.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix insisted it had to be only the two of them, her and Hermione. Nobody else. They would rouse the dragons together, and rile them into attacking the Morsmordre troops in Dnepropetrovsk. Of course, the entire plan was thin on details of how they were going to do that.</p><p>It was only after they arrived in the sanctuary, which was buried between a park and a military training range, with both having intact woodlands and sand-scrub to buffer the surrounding farms from the immense space of the dragon sanctuary, folded in on itself and removed from the map, that Hermione began to have her suspicions. The first thing they did, regardless, was immediately cast warming charms on themselves. It still didn’t seem like enough.</p><p>She decided to get it over with. “Bellatrix, we’re going to ride the dragons, aren’t we?”</p><p>“Of course, Granger. How else would we do it?” Bellatrix blinked and looked at her with what might be— <em> damn it all— </em> an actually sincere innocence.</p><p>“Alright.” Hermione forced herself to answer. “Alright. They’ll like a rock lair… Not much rock around here, maybe exposed on one of those hills?” The woods, at least, meant that the bitterly cold wind was blocked from playing directly on them, and the reserve was filled with low hills ahead of them, as they used magic to pass through the anti-muggle barrier at the entrance, and then stepped past an abandoned MinKol building. “The Dnepr Rapids mean there is rock around here, the …”</p><p>“Well, we are firmly in the Poltava Plain,” Bellatrix answered, her face twisting up as she began to walk forward with a purposefulness that Hermione didn’t share. “<em>Draco Sekonius.</em>”</p><p>“There’s a spell to search for dragons, then we can just…” Hermione trailed off, seeing the obvious problem with that.</p><p>“One does not simply apparate in front of a dragon, Granger,” Bella answered, cackling. But just as Hermione had managed to avoid saying it, Bella managed to avoid an insulting follow-on rejoinder. Somehow.</p><p>Instead, they both started walking forward, Bellatrix following whatever signal she got from her wand. The problem was that it was through the snow. They got about ten metres or so before Hermione started to reflect on how utterly <em> stupid </em> it had been to think this would be other than a joke, or a disaster. The snow was deep enough to bring their progress to a gruelling, messy halt.</p><p>Bellatrix paused, saying nothing. They both looked at each other. Hermione desperately wanted to avoid being the first to speak, to acknowledge how ridiculous this had been. They would barely walk two hundred metres before collapsing, at that rate.</p><p>But Bella was carefully looking around their natural environment. “Boughs. Boughs from the trees.”</p><p>Hermione half-flopped her way through the snow toward one she found fallen. “ Alright, what are you thinking of, Bellatrix?”</p><p>“I can use a transfigurate spell to make tree-boughs into snowshoes, <em> obviously, </em> mudblood. Doesn’t it ever occur to you to use magic to get your way out of problems? Where there’s a witch, there’s a way, you know! Or rather, apparently not, ” she mocked.</p><p>“I’ve <em> never heard </em> of that spell,” Hermione answered defensively. “And why don’t you apologise?” She stopped by the bough, refusing to pick it up.</p><p>“Or else <em> what </em> ?” It was Bella at her worst, the Bella of almost childlike rages.</p><p>“Or else I won’t pick the bough up,” Hermione replied, snappishly, feeling the effort of slogging through heavy snow having quickly gotten to her.</p><p>“Well, what in Merlin’s name is this? Some kind of strike like you were trying to rabble-rouse up with the elves and S.P.E.W.? Do you want to get paid? Do you want me to pay you for the sex, too?” She swayed her hips with her off-hand planted firmly on one, though the effect was lost in the massive coat, her expression was somehow attractive even when she was insulting the hell out of Hermione.</p><p>Hermione spat into the snow. “Damnit, <em> take that back. </em> Fuck, <em> Bella, </em> I would <em> never </em> ask for money for…”</p><p>“Then shut up and get on with our mission, people’s lives are counting on us, Granger!”</p><p>“What the <em> hell </em> do <em> you </em> know about peoples’ lives? You’re doing this for <em> you. </em> A million deaths wouldn’t be enough for you! I damn well know that you would do absolutely anything to get yourself and I suppose Delphini through this war alive. Oh wait, forget about suffering them yourself--you’ve already<em> caused</em> a million deaths and maybe a whole lot more! And I slept with you… Because I <em> am </em> a fucking idiot, I guess. So you don’t have to apologise for that! But you damn well apologise for the slurs, right now.”</p><p>Bella paused. A cloudy look passed her face; Hermione thought it might actually be regret. “I am sorry, Hermione. I have been trying.”</p><p>The apology made Hermione smile. She picked up the bough. “Called me my name,” the smile turned into a grin. “You called me my name. Apology accepted, Bellatrix.” She turned to collect the other boughs, it felt like slogging through the snow was easier.</p><p>“Good. Do you know how to snow-shoe?” Bella asked, next, her voice sounding like she expected it all to have been in vain.</p><p>“The Army trained me,” Hermione answered as she picked up the forth and headed back to where Bellatrix was standing. “But how did <em> you </em> learn?”</p><p>“I taught myself. When I was young, you know, there was a lot more snow in Britain. And the Black Manor—not that nasty place in London that my cousins lived in, the real one—was near Fair Snape Fell in Lancashire. Back before your muggle relatives wrecked the world, there was plenty of snow there every year. And it was a way to … Be on my own, Granger.”</p><p>“Why do you think <em> muggles </em> ruined the planet?”</p><p>“I’m not a raving idiot. I remember the environmental movement in the seventies and early eighties, do you think it didn’t come up in Death Eater circles? We’re not monsters, we had <em> reasons. </em> The natural world being impacted will keep damaging magic, keeping… Taking everything beautiful out of the planet, and replace it with drab muggle ways. The destruction of the planet—your own science confirmed it and you kept doing it anyway. ”</p><p>Hermione wanted to take that at face value. She wanted, of course, to believe that in some sense the Death Eaters had all started as a bunch of radical Wizard Environmental Terrorists. It would be reassuring that she had fallen in love with a misguided woman instead of someone who just killed for pleasure.</p><p>But… “what about the nuclear war, then?”</p><p>Bellatrix <em> winced. </em> “I wasn’t there when they made the decision,” she answered defensively, and finally set to work on turning the boughs into snow-shoes.</p><p>Hermione watched her work. The wince had surprised her. She didn’t know what to make of it, other than the possibility that at some level, Bellatrix really was ashamed of her involvement in the nuclear exchange, or rather her guilt by association in it. Then she thought of something else in the nasty exchange from before. “You know about S.P.E.W?”</p><p>“Of course. Elves talk. Elves talk to me, in fact, particularly because I know basic courtesy.”</p><p>Coming from Bellatrix that was pretty rich, but Hermione <em> had </em> seen her be nice to her sister’s elf. “And… You discussed S.P.E.W?”</p><p>“Of course. I think it’s ridiculous, Elves want to serve. But it’s true they are abused by many.”</p><p><em> Like your own family? </em> Hermione managed not to say it, though, even as her mind flashed back to the decapitated elf heads mummified on the wall of Grimmauld Place.</p><p>“And I like knowing about my adversaries. So I took the time to understand it,” Bellatrix finished, testing the fit of the snow-shoes on her boots, and nodding for Hermione to do the same. “Alright, enough delays, let’s go.”</p><p>“Well… Yes, of course.” Hermione quickly started of. Despite her shorter height and age, Bellatrix proved that the years had not removed her memory of the process; she was still better at crossing ground with snowshoes than Hermione was. “Thank you for at least considering it. I should have liked if all purebloods did.”</p><p>“I’m sure you would have,” Bellatrix laughed, and carried on. Now they made good time, and soon enough, a smooth, low hill with rock, glacial erratics, piled around the bottom, marked their path. Covered in snow, it looked like a burrow, or even a Kurgan, and Hermione wondered if the dragon habitat had actually been artificially created.</p><p>Along the way, Bellatrix had swung out and snagged a deer with the Imperious Curse. She was now marching it toward the den. “We’ve got to get the dragons out somehow,” she explained.</p><p>Hermione couldn’t dispute that, it would be much better than going into the massive burrow, essentially a hill and not a small one, either. She remembered the Ukrainian Ironbelly from Gringotts and was not at all in the mood to go into a burrow in which several of them lived.</p><p>“Now, whatever you do,” Hermione murmured to herself, “break step, so they’re not attracted by the rhythm…”</p><p>Bellatrix shot her a look from where she was forcing the deer to go on toward the entrance to the burrow.</p><p>“Just a bad paraphrase of a book I read,” Hermione answered, grinning. "It's nothing." A rush of anticipation filled her. They could do it. They <em> would </em> do it.</p><p>The dragons lunged for their prey. Two massive Ukrainian Ironbellies, younger and healthier than the one in Gringotts, they exploded out of their den with furious roars and snorts of smoke. The eating had been lean, lately, and any opportunity was taken…</p><p>With a combined blast of fire that interlocked from the mouths of the hunting pair, their victim, the deer, was neatly cooked. Snarling, snapping, they made to do something somewhere between asserting dominance and sharing the food.</p><p>Nodding, Hermione and Bellatrix split up and went for each dragon, while they were distracted by eating. They came closer and closer, until there was no closer. You either leapt onto the dragon’s back with the assistance of a quick levitating spell, or your didn’t.</p><p>So they both did. Your position had to be perfectly chosen, too close in for the dragon to turn back and blast you off of its back. Too far forward, bucking its head or clawing with its wings would dislodge you. Just perfect…</p><p>And the agitated dragon would leap into the air to try and force you off. For the second time in her life, Hermione was flying on the back of a dragon. Hanging desperately onto the spikes, she saw the ground whirl away below her. Despite her trepidation, now that she had flown many times on the Galinas in the heat of battle, it just didn’t seem as scary.</p><p>The problem was making the dragon go remotely close to anywhere like they wanted. To the southwest, to Dnepropetrovsk. Dragging herself into a more comfortable position, Hermione prepared to experiment with this, just to see Bella’s dragon turning sharply and angrily with a hiss toward the city, then away from it, then toward it again. But each time, Bella was waving her wand. Then she protected her voice with another spell.</p><p>“Hermione, a stinging charm! Be lively! Unlike any other beast, a dragon turns <em> toward </em> pain!”</p><p><em> The opposite of a whip, in otherwords. </em> Hermione snapped her wand out, a quick stinging charm, and, the dragon <em> turned. </em></p><p>She made haste to follow Bellatrix. The air whipping across her seemed to overwhelm all of the warming charms, to chill her down to the very bones. But the dragon itself was warm, and that warmth welling up in her fought against the other impulse, the one for the slipstream to steal her breath, and soon enough, her life.</p><p>Instead, she rallied, and ahead of them, the ruined city of Dnepropetrovsk began to spread out. As directed to General Dodson, the anti-air on their own lines let them through, though for a few minutes Hermione certainly remained in mortal terror of the prospect of ‘friendly fire’.</p><p>And then with Bellatrix in the lead, snapping her dragon around, straight toward the enemy lines, the troops of the Morsmordre realised just what a predicament they were in, as the two massive, six tonne dragons descended on their lines abruptly, undetectable, grey against a grey sky, until the very last moment.</p><p>They opened fire with everything they had on the dragons, and bullets and the detonation of automatic cannon shells plinging and spreading shrapnel—for the moment, without any effect at all against the massive ‘iron’ bellies of the Ukrainian dragons—told Hermione that they were in very, very hot water. But it also riled the dragons, thrashing, alerting them to the threat, ironically guaranteeing that what came next… Came with a terrible fury.</p><p>The dragon dove, and the dragon began to burn. Hermione watched Bellatrix abruptly disappear, disapparating from the back of her dragon, riled enough by the gunfire to keep fighting and burning, instead of using the opportunity to escape. She sucked in her breath, and in relief, duplicated the gesture.</p><p>A moment later, she stood beside Bellatrix at the Army’s command post, trembling in relief. Behind them, in fire, fang and fury, the enemy lines burned.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. Breaking step to avoid riling the dragons is, of course, a reference to Sand Worms, and Dune.<br/>2. The TOS-1 Buratino is a specialised MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) used by the Russian CBRN/NBC (Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear, or Nuclear Biological Chemical) troops in an engineering supporting role; thermobarics essentially produce a fuel-air explosion.<br/>3. One begins to see some more of Bella's past here. It will all come together.<br/>4. Stockholm syndrome is a so-called psychological neurosis where under high stress, you associate with your captors.<br/>5. A Raion is a sub-oblast level administrative unit in Russia. (An Oblast is the standard equivalent of a Province).<br/>6. Yes, -40C really is equal to -40F.<br/>7. In ASOIAF, Dragons turn toward whips. I shamelessly inserted that tidbit.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0032"><h2>32. Poltava</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-Two: Poltava</p><p> </p><p>The war still raged across the Ukraine. But they were on the offensive, and it had changed everything, for everyone on the multiple fronts. Morale was up, confidence was growing. They kept fighting, and they kept winning. And in the case of Bella’s Black Guards, they fought for themselves now, not for the Dark Lord in London.</p><p>Her Army left the burned, nuked ruins of the east bank of Dnepropetrovsk in the curling dust of snow. They covered ground, hard and fast, across the lowlands of the Dnepr river above the rapids. They headed north-northwest. To their north, driving south, was a Russian Army out of Sumy. In the middle, Voldemort’s forces tried to hold the lines open for their armies to the east to continue retreating. They were working frantically, using slaves, the impressed, ensorcelled second-line troops, to prepare traps and fortifications.</p><p>If they could hold the position they were fortifying, they could keep a foothold on the left bank of the Dnepr. If they could hold the position they were fortifying, they could keep the Armies of the CIS off of Kiev, and keep the city subjugated to Voldemort’s power. They could, indeed, resume the offensive with the next summer, and drive back deep into the eastern Ukraine and Russia.</p><p>If.</p><p>When Hermione first saw the intelligence reports, she couldn’t help a dark laugh. Bellatrix looked up from where she had been taking down instructions, passed by radio from Astana. “What are you on about, Granger?”</p><p>“Never let it be said that God doesn’t have a sense of irony, Ma’am,” she answered with her strict on-duty formality. “They’re fortifying <em> Poltava.</em>”</p><p>“Well, yes, they are. What of, Granger?” Bellatrix shrugged and gestured at the map, looking vaguely irritated, that look which told Hermione that she was starting to wonder again if Hermione was really the Brightest Witch of Her Age.</p><p>But Hermione met it head-on, this time. “The Battle of Poltava in 1709 was fought after the Coldest Winter in Europe in five hundred years, Bellatrix. It weakened the Swedish Army until they could no longer resist the power of the Tsar Pyotr Velikiy. Then he finished them, the Swedish Army broke itself attacking his fortifications at Poltava.”</p><p>She snorted, a sharp <em> Hmph</em>. “Well, that’s a bit of a mixed message, isn’t it? The enemy will be the ones defending the ground at Poltava, this time, and we will be attacking.”</p><p>But Hermione had at least proved that she paid attention to her military readings. She couldn’t resist a grin. “The advantage, is if we win, that’s it. We wrap the campaign up with a bow,” Hermione said, though she shook her head slightly at the increasing evidence of the dispositions. It was going to be a truly massive battle.</p><p>“If we break through,” Bellatrix answered. “If.”</p><p>“Do you think they were expecting us to deal with their forces in Dnepropetrovsk so quickly?”</p><p>“Certainly not,” Bellatrix replied, before wordlessly extending her hand to take another mug of tea.</p><p>“That suggests they’ll be weak in the south. They were probably hoping to force us to bypass even Novomoskovsk, maybe even advance through Pavlograd before turning west further north,” Hermione mused. “I bet their line will be weakest in the south, around Kobelyaki. They will still be working to fortify it after we punched through here. So we should just go on ahead as fast as we can, and the Vorskla river is no real obstacle. If we cut them off from Kremenchuk, they can only retreat one way—direction Kiev. ”</p><p>“We then turn north toward Reshetilovka to complete the cauldron?” Bella was looking sharply across the maps of roads and terrains. It was open, flat terrain, ideal for tank battles and manoeuvre warfare. Only the weather was bad. If it had been summer it would have been lovely, but there was barely a summer anymore. Instead, it was -40C and the wind was blowing snow and sculpting it into drifts across the land, hindering an advance which might have otherwise been blazing fast.</p><p>“Yes, that will do,” Hermione agreed.</p><p>Dodson had been listening to the two witches, and nodded his assent. “I have no objections, Madame Black. It’s only fifty klicks for our lead elements to reach Kobelyaki, shall we push on immediately?”</p><p>“Yes, do so!” Bella nodded, gesturing grandly with a gloved hand. “ We’ll move out shortly, Granger.”</p><p>“Are we going to the front?” Hermione watched Bella closely, and could see the woman twitch, as if she was about to affirm that, of course she was going to go to the front.</p><p>Then she shook her head in the negative. “No, I need to stay with the command post and remain in charge of the operation for this one.”</p><p>Hermione could see Dodson looking relieved as the General moved away to signal to their troops. She smiled. “Yes, it’s going to be a very complicated operational mission. But we’ll manage it. ”</p><p>“Get yourself some tea, Granger. It will be a long day.”</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The snow hugged the ground, like a low running sea across the plain. It streaked and swept around hills and buildings, and caught and drifted downstream from fences. The low blowing snow obscured the roads, but provided a subtle tell-tale of a sunken patch across the surface. In the bitter cold, some of their vehicles had trouble operating, so they ran them constantly. They refuelled with the engines running, and ignored the risk.</p><p>Tracked MLRS launchers, down to some of their last reloads. Fuel tanker after fuel tanker, coming up behind the advance units. The armoured vehicles in the lead ploughed in columns through the blowing snow. They ran hard and fast, and their engines made them warm against the bitter cold. Armoured with sunglasses, balaclava and fur cap, the commanders sometimes popped their heads out of the hatches, but they didn’t linger long. The wind blowing in this cold as the tanks moved fast was absolutely savage.</p><p>Near the hamlet of Lisne, about four and a half kilometres from Kobelyaki, the lead tank columns came in for a shelling. There was a battalion of 155’s positioned near the city, and they laid down fires across the small village which was barely more than a strip of three roads with houses down each side. The tanks had already moved off the roads, so they buttoned up and moved in among the abandoned, banded riverbeds, where the meandering river Vorskla used to run. Bands of trees provided some cover, but the indirect fire from the enemy howitzers continued.</p><p>Shells fell down into the snow, slammed into the frozen ground below. The slap of a flash of light, the black column rising from the fertile bottomland earth, the thunderclap of the detonation. Over and over again, as the guns were served somewhere to the north of Kobelyaki, full shells descended, using concussion and maybe a lucky hit to knock out the armoured vehicles. The shrapnel, lethal to anyone exposed outside of the armoured cocoon of a fighting vehicle, forced them to slow, without anyone to sight for the manoeuvring of the tanks in the poor visibility.</p><p>The enemy had to have a team providing spotting, but the exact position was hard to say. That they were engaged less than five klicks from Kobelyaki implied the enemy had not been expecting them to go off-road to the north of the P52 highway and the town.</p><p>Bellatrix and Hermione consulted maps in the back of the rattling command track. Being in it at least meant they had hot tea, though they were cramped and surrounded by six subordinates, and comms messages were constantly coming and going. “ Gaiova?” Hermione asked, looking at the name.</p><p>“I think it’s ‘Haiove’,” Bellatrix sniffed. Of course, she was referring to a map in English.</p><p>“Russian, Ukrainian, English, start mixing and matching and you get confused fast,” Hermione smiled for a moment, then it faded. “It has a clear line of fire down every one of the approach roads. We should send a reconnaissance in force there, they might have put a strong force east of the river to catch us in enfilade and we avoided it by having the lead columns circle north of Samarshchyna. Forward defence, since they didn’t have time to fortify. ”</p><p>Bella looked at her for a moment. “Aren’t you a smartarse. But you’re likely right. Let’s send a regiment of Chally’s through the forest to the south of ‘Haiove’ and we’ll kick in the hornet’s nest.” She leaned over and picked up one of the radio headsets and looked at the commo. “The 17<sup>th </sup> ? Brigadier Gibson? I want you to pull off the road south of Sosnivka and proceed due north through the tree farm to the north of that village. Your objective is Haiove, take it quickly.”</p><p>Hermione couldn’t hear the man’s replies, but she had to imagine that the former Janissary officers, hearing Bellatrix say ‘take it quickly’, would move aggressively, and without regard to the losses. Bellatrix, for her part, had casually thrown a brigade of some of the best tanks in the world forward on a supposition.</p><p>But it was a supposition they both agreed made sense. Hermione leaned back into the cold wall of the command track, feeling it rumbling and rattling below her. She could, in her mind’s eye, see the tanks spreading out from column on the road into battle formation and pressing through the village, and then the woods. She could, because she had been in that place herself before, feel the fear of those among them, who wondered just how powerful the enemy they were about to face would be.</p><p>Of course, she had spent the last few years despising the Janissaries as money-loving traitors who would serve, willingly, the Death Eaters who hated them, and used them as crack troops. The national governments of regions in Europe which wanted independence—these, Voldemort had replaced with cronies, who made false promises of independence, who played them up into providing troops—Hermione could at least understand them. She had thought she had <em> hated </em> the Janissaries. But it turned out they were actually just men, too, capable of overcoming the situations they had found themselves in.</p><p>She unfolded another map covering the area to the south, and tried to keep thinking on her feet. The VDV, with their lighter vehicles, had been coming up behind the heavier Janissary divisions. But they were elite troops, and fast, and right near the command element with Hermione and Bellatrix were engineering detachments. “Bella,” she began innocently, slipping in the moment.</p><p>Bellatrix shot her a look, but then just nodded.</p><p>“Let’s have the VDV,” Hermione continued, though with a tight smile now, “go with our engineering detachments to try and cross at Proskury. They’ve certainly blown the bridge, but if the engineers can get them across the ice… Attack at more points in the line to find a weakness, basically. If they get across they’re fast enough to make up time to the north. ”</p><p>“ I’ll need to rely on the 10<sup>th </sup> Regular Division to defend against an attack from the direction of Karlovka, then,” Bellatrix shrugged. “But of course you’re right, Granger. Let’s get on it.” She reached for the radio again, and began to issue the orders, while a gloved finger struck the map, illustrating a position on the topography. “ And get us there, Granger. I want to <em> see </em> this.”</p><p>The position marked was a low rise about eleven and a half klicks southeast of Lisne. It reached an altitude of 90 metres, whereas most of the land between them and the fighting was bottom-lands at 68 metres, and the fighting itself was on the low ridge fronting the current course of the river, at around 75 metres.</p><p>“Alright, I will get us into position, Madame Black.” Hermione grinned and turned away to issue her own orders to the command group, turning them to the north along country roads through farmland covered in blowing snow. For the moment, it felt like they were a team, working together for a common goal. It was a rather nice feeling.</p><p>About twenty minutes later, they were in position on the ridge. By this point, the attack by the 17<sup>th </sup> Armoured Brigade had developed around Haiove. With the Army’s own 155’s engaging the enemy battalion in counter-battery fire to suppress them, a detachment of MLRS had laid down covering fires across the woods south of Haiove, then the tanks had advanced through them, with several detachments of wizards apparating into position two klicks east by the road junction with the P52 highway. There, they covered along the highway embankment to shield the tanks advancing into Haiove and attack the defenders.</p><p>The rippling explosions blasting through the trees that otherwise would have become homes, or paper, in some forgotten world of peace, illustrated the lines of the advancing tanks. The strange glows in green, red, blue, yellow of combat magic, the rippling effect in the air and the abrupt walls of snow created by shields interrupting the flow of the drifting snow across the ground, all of this, Hermione could see. She raised her wand and cast far-sight, giving herself an up-close image of the big Chally II tanks slamming their way over trees and any other obstacles unstoppable force.</p><p>Well, except for the ones caught by magic or shell, smashed to pieces or burning, visible in glimpses through the wood. Each time another died, with it men. The whole of the village was burning, too, and with it, whatever was left of the hopes and dreams of those there. Hermione hoped they had fled, fast and far, or at least to a wood further from the combat than the one their own forces now attacked through.</p><p>Around her, the command staff was quickly setting up a forward position. Command tracks were not meant for the commander of an Army. It was only with magic and the Telecaster and a lot of bravado that Bellatrix made her forward command style actually work. She had a large group of them with a recon element and a large contingent of wizards, some of the most junior of whom had been simply apparating around with messages, except they had all been sent forward to reinforce the lines by now, making the command situation for C3 even worse.</p><p>Somehow, they were still moving forward. The Janissaries and the VDV were both highly motivated, and Bellatrix’s command style lent itself naturally toward letting the units under her command execute <em> Auftragstaktik, </em> what in Hermione’s staff education had been called ‘Printsip direktivnogo upravleniya’, the Principle of Directive Control. Bellatrix had not issued orders to the artillery or the MLRS units to support the attack on Haiove, the fire support had been requested by the 17 <sup> th </sup> brigade, which was told only to occupy the position of the village from the south; they had also chosen their own dispositions for their supporting wizards and witches, because Bellatrix had given her muggle subordinate commanders the freedom to execute exactly as they pleased, precisely because she didn’t really care.</p><p>It was a little bit of the height of absurdism, but it had worked, and it had created the bonds of loyalty which had led these men to defect. Now, with the opening moves all well in play, the command tracks around them were forming a block against the snow and wind. With the command tracks in a laager, both as protection and as a block against the bone-shattering cold, they could set their tents up within the laager to have enough space to properly manage the battle from. The command staff spilled out into the bitter cold as the diesel heaters were fired up, pumping hot air into the tents as they were erected as fast as possible. Hermione finished supervising the set-up, the roar of the artillery and rockets in the distance serving as an aural cacophony which was unending, a rumbling declaration that the battle was joined.</p><p>As Hermione turned back to the view from the ridge, Bellatrix joined her. Behind them, as a last grand gesture, a temporary aluminium flag pole was hoisted into position, and the Black Family Standard was run up on it. Hermione hastily finished her cigarette and tossed the butt to the wind. Bellatrix was (by her standards, so not very) subtly discouraging of the habit, which made Hermione rather embarrassed for it.</p><p>“Alright Granger, what have we got?”</p><p>“The Seventeenth is fully committed now, and they’re advancing into Haiove as we speak,” Hermione answered. Then she turned her attention to the VDV.</p><p>Bellatrix cast her own far-sight spell, pointing her wand toward Haiove for a moment to magnify the scene, and then turned to the southwest with Hermione. She could see the engineers’ bridging equipment already going up, as the CIS troops deployed to cover them. Small groups of wizards and teams of Wizard Protection forces had crossed the river to set up forward pickets, and come under fire from a force of defenders. The VDV Division commander already had their number, though; the 2S9 Nona and ASU-85 mortar and artillery systems had already opened up to support them as the Black Guards engineers crossed over behind the wizards, to beginning setting up the bridge.</p><p>The VDV troops dismounted from their armoured vehicles, arranged in a rough half-moon position around the crossing, and began to send infantry across the frozen river. Though this risked the ice breaking, especially when the advancing infantry came under fire from the defenders, it was a risk they simply had to bear as they forced the crossing.</p><p>Their shared instincts had been right, then. The positions here were not strong enough to hold off a crossing. But the enemy was clever, too. By adopting a forward position in Haiove they had given themselves an actual chance to defend Kobelyaki, but there was no comparable position around Proskury on the east bank.</p><p>The wind carried away the clouds of smoke from the artillery, and mingled it with the snow. Bellatrix watched silently for a minute in the bitter cold, while the men advanced in perilous conditions across the ice, and exploding mortar rounds sometimes did not crack the thick sheet, and sometimes, terribly, split it open, with a drenching column of icy water rising into the air, and men slipped under never to be seen again.</p><p>They pressed on.</p><p>She had thought it was reckless and dangerous before, but Hermione had to admit that Bellatrix’s habit of leading from the front and still involving herself directly in combat was understandable now that she herself was trapped in a staff position. Hermione had always been at the front, before. Now it was a little embarrassing to be out of the direct combat, knowing that her spells could save lives and drive back the enemy. But, of course, it might well be that her mind had saved even more on this day. She could hope so.</p><p>Bellatrix had seen enough. It was so bitterly cold, anyway, that her exposed face in a war between the warming spell and the savage wind. So she turned back, and entered the newly erected main command tent, with Hermione on her heel. There was hot tea waiting, boiled on the manifold of one of the diesel heaters. Side by side, the two witches worked as their forces drove forward across snow and ice, guns roaring in the swirl of snow and smoke. Men fought and died under the cracks and booms of guns and magic alike, and the positions of the Morsmordre were assaulted by the men who only weeks before had served as their comrades, now fighting alongside of Russian troops, fighting both in the south and the north in great numbers. All around Poltava, the swirl of combat descended like a storm from the heavens.</p><p>And, through the swirl of burning tanks and vehicles and the bodies of dead men laid out with their blood pooling on the snow, mixed with clods of frozen dirt churned up from below, the 17 <sup> th </sup> pushed its way through Haiove. The enemy, rather than retreating, was destroyed outright where they stood. A second brigade converted with them from Lisne; the enemy blew up the bridge to Kobelyaki, but north of the bridge where the ice was intact, infantry dismounted and crossed through the fire to establish a foothold, while the 120mm mortars thundered to drive back the defenders, and the combat engineers came up with more bridging gear.</p><p>In the south, the swirl of battle resolved around the first of the bridges in place. The VDV’s Tula Division, with its augmented CIS units, swept across with increasing strength and power as the infantry, under the artillery fire that could range across the river, dislodged the enemy mortars, capturing several. The ensorcelled troops defending the position began to retreat in disorder.</p><p>They were cracking the front open. The race to pocket the enemy in the Poltava ‘cauldron’ had begun.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione didn’t sleep for the next forty hours. She lived on spells and potions to keep her awake, on caffeine and cigarettes. By the second day, the particularly savage cold spell had lessened, but it was st ill -20C. The enemy position, though, had collapsed. They charged north toward Reshetylivka while the ground was swept with artillery fire and magical combat alike. At Butenky the enemy rallied and fought with their tanks hulldown behind the railway embankment. It was the last attempt to stop them. When they drove through the ruined railway track on the assault, the enemy’s forces broke completely, and they had an easy run north toward their objective.</p><p>The aircraft came up, and began to attack those of the enemy who were now fleeing west, toward Kiev, with all other routes of escape having been cut off. This meant 273 km of retreating on the wrong bank of the river, under full attack from the Russian Air Force. Wizards and Witches were used too, apparating to forward positions to use magic to ambush retreating columns of the enemy troops and wrecking as many vehicles as possible, destroying and damaging the roads, and then disapparating away before a sustained battle could develop.</p><p>In this way, forty sleepless hours were passed conducting the operations necessary to utterly annihilate an enemy and trap twenty enemy divisions within a series of cauldrons across the southeast. The fighting had been relentless, but from the moment of Bellatrix’s defection and the successful flipping of the Army in the Crimean, the outcome had unfolded with a terrible, methodical certainty. They had smashed Voldemort’s Army in the Russian and Ukrainian lands.</p><p>It was when they reached Zhovtneve on the rail line toward Kiev from Poltava, about nine klicks from the Reshetylivka city centre, that Hermione saw it, or rather, she heard it before she saw it. As the command element slowed down, she pulled her balaclava down over her face and popped up out of the hatch.</p><p>In front of them was one of their mechanized brigades, with the men being greeted by Russian troops. The Russian soldiers, their equipment, it was all there, just like it had been before Hermione launched her desperation mission. Just before she had chained herself irrevocably to Bellatrix precisely to enable the victory that they had now clearly won. It was a perfectly overwhelming feeling. There, just west of the train station and the associated freight depot to the north, they had linked up with the Russian Army. They had completed the encirclement.</p><p>Bellatrix had kept her promise, honoured her agreement, delivered the left bank of the Dnepr to the CIS. Hermione stared at the cheering, celebrating men. The Black Guards were more subdued. Their future was uncertain, they had abandoned their families to follow this course, for some vague hope of a future of liberty. For the forces of the CIS, however, there was no doubt or hesitation. This was the moment the war turned. This was the moment that the forces of the enemy were no longer on the offensive. This was the moment that with their full strength mustered, they had wrecked them, defeated them utterly, liberated tens of millions of people and the whole swathe of the southeast. It was an hour of unmitigated joy. Hermione dimly knew that soon enough, the church bells would be ringing in the free cities of Russia, and now also the Ukraine. A grim, bitter winter would grow a bit brighter. The women watching the children—Teddy included—by Andromeda Tonks’ apartment in Nizhniy Novgorod would at least have something to smile about, if only a little. The workers in the factories would feel like they had, in fact, accomplished something.</p><p>They had handed the enemy a defeat worthy of those blows which in ‘44 and ‘45 their grandfathers had delivered to the Nazi power.</p><p>Hermione grinned, dropped back into the command track with the slam of the hatch, and pulled her balaclava off. Exhausted men with sunglasses against the burning blindness of the snow and stubble on their chins could, at last, rest.</p><p>And so could she.</p><p>And so could Bella. “Bellatrix, we’ve joined up with the Russian Army. We’ve encircled Poltava.”</p><p>Bella looked up from her map, and stared at Hermione over a steaming mug of tea.</p><p>She looked, in that moment, fragile, vulnerable, and perfectly lost, like she had never actually expected to get here, and see the sun dawn on the day when she had succeeded. Then she began to laugh, her cackling, manic laugh.</p><p>But whether it was from the tiredness, or from how much things had changed, it no longer grated on Hermione’s nerves.</p><p>About two hours later, after meetings and salutes and drawing lines of sectors of control on maps with equally exhausted Russian officers, they found themselves in the station master’s office of the railway station, where cots had been laid out. Hermione was asleep in minutes. The offensive was over.</p><p>But for the war, it was only the end of the beginning.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Ukrainian/Russian names--there are usually slight differences. The Russian maps would use Russian, and the English maps would use transliterations of the Ukrainian, thus this light-hearted debate.<br/>ASU-85 -- an airborne self-propelled gun vehicle.<br/>2S9 Nona -- self-propelled 120mm mortar armed vehicle.<br/>155 -- would be shorthand for a 155mm artillery piece, standard general purpose artillery in most of the armies in the world.<br/>laager -- a circular defensive position with the outer lines reinforced with vehicles.<br/>hulldown -- the hull of the tank is concealed by terrain so only the turret is visible while fighting defensively. The tank can engage the enemy, but the enemy can only fire at the turret, which generally is better protected.<br/>commo -- English language military slang for "comms officer".</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0033"><h2>33. The Sisters Black</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-Three: Sisters Black.</p><p> </p><p>The heat in the railway station still worked. Hermione was not sure for precisely how long that she slept, for how long that she bathed in this strange luxury. Perhaps it was a boiler fuelled by diesel fuel taken from locomotives outside. It didn’t matter.</p><p>She slept, and slept… Her dreams tossed through visions of Bellatrix and Harry and Ron staring at her with condemnatory gazes. The dreams were not pleasant, for all that she was dimly aware that she had done a great thing and should be pleased with herself. She had other dreams, though, dreams contrasting with the first set—dreams of Bella, alone in the snow. She wanted to be with her, but the older woman was always too far away.</p><p>It was something of a miracle that she woke up feeling refreshed, but checking her chrono, it was probably that she had slept for more than fourteen hours. She stirred, just to realise that her cot was pushed up to Bella’s. They were alone, sure, but she was surprised by it. Hermione reached out and brushed Bella’s shoulder, but the woman was still sleeping, so she refused to wake her, got up, and looked for some way to make caffeine to hold at bay a looming headache. <em>Probably withdrawal symptoms from the lack of caffeine… </em></p><p>She opened and closed drawers as quietly as she could, and finally found a box of packets of Nescafe. Hermione felt a growing coldness toward Bella, still sleeping—her dreams, or rather nightmares, were coming back and reminding her exactly what her friends would think of all of this, both the living and the dead. Grimacing for a moment, she dumped the contents of a few of the packs into a cup, and worked a spell on some of the water to heat it. It felt mildly like an abuse of good taste to use magic to make Nescafe, but whatever, she needed the caffeine.</p><p>Her tongue twisted at the taste, but it was hot and it was what she needed. But Hermione had only had one gulp of it, when with a start, Bellatrix woke up. Now, for the first time, Hermione could see her jolt in bed—as if awakening from something unpleasant. She regretted even that single moment of cold thought s toward Bella, nothing humanised her lover more than the suggestion that she might, as Hermione just had, have suffered from bad dreams.</p><p>“Did you have a nightmare, Bellatrix?”</p><p>“<em>Absolutely not</em>!” She struggled to her feet, shaking her head. “I just can’t believe I slept so long. Granger, give me some of that?”</p><p>Hermione grimaced, <em>naturally</em>, and glanced at her cup. “It’s instant coffee. I used a <em>Aeolus</em> spell to heat the water. I’m sure there’s some kind of canteen in the waiting room, we could head down there instead…”</p><p>“Yes. I’m not desperate enough to drink instant coffee,” Bellatrix huffed, shooting at a look at Hermione.</p><p>The younger woman very much felt like she was being judged. <em> She’s so damned petty sometimes. Sometimes? What am I saying</em>. It was about then that her mind had to chime in and remind her that she was sleeping with this woman, who had killed her best friend’s godfather, her best friend who was himself dead, at the hands of the man this woman had served, the man who had fathered her child.</p><p>It was with an intense feeling, the feeling of wondering precisely what she had done with her life, that Hermione accompanied Bella down to the Cantine in the station’s waiting room. Both of them were still in enough of their clothes to be presentable, and troops came to attention. Bella waved her gloved left hand idly, acknowledging but ignoring them. She went straight for the tea, and Hermione followed her since one cup of a caffeinated beverage certainly wasn’t going to be enough.</p><p>They had outrun their own supply lines, such as they were, and so it was iron rations that the field kitchen was serving up. Sausages and beans. But everyone there was too hungry and exhausted to complain. Also, even Bellatrix could see that it made the men feel better to see her simply fall in line with Hermione and grab a plate, before heading toward the former railway offices and ticket room where the command section had set up.</p><p>“Ma’am,” General Dodson greeted them. It wasn’t just a casual greeting, though. “I wanted to let you know that were were informed about six hours ago that there’s someone coming to meet us.”</p><p>“Oh?” Bellatrix looked up from her tea, as she was revived with it, she managed to look almost bored.</p><p>“The acting Prime Minister. Since, I understand, we’re to be the British Army now…”</p><p>Bellatrix froze next to Hermione, the younger woman could feel her tension, and imagined she could feel the emotions washing through her. “How long until she arrives?”</p><p>“Very soon, she was already in the air when I got the message..” Dodson trailed off as he watched Bellatrix more or less shovelling the food into her mouth.</p><p>“Narcissa’s coming, Narcissa’s coming,” she mumbled barely over a whisper, side-eyeing Hermione almost suspiciously for a moment. Hermione offered a smile, but it was ignored; instead, Bellatrix rallied and tried to be serious. “I… Thank you, General. Is there anything else to report?”</p><p>“The enemy is headlong retreat toward Kiev. What’s left of them. We received a halt order to all our operations, because we lack regular supply with the Confederal Army.”</p><p>“Good. We’ve done enough.” Bellatrix finished shoving food into her mouth and got up with her tea, leaving the bowl behind on a map drawer. “Hurry up, Granger. I won’t have you looking like a wet rat when Narcissa shows up. Your new dress uniform should be somewhere. ”</p><p><em> Gee, thanks.</em> With a sigh, Hermione got up and followed the older woman, trying to eat as she walked. Again, she wondered what the hell she had gotten herself into.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>A military band was playing <em>Rule Britannia.</em> The smart convoy of a mix of armoured cars and limousines rolled up through the shattered streets of Zhovtneve. Troops with their bayonets fixed came to attention across the railway from the train station.</p><p>In the middle, the limousine had little Union Jacks on each side of the bonnet, whipping in the cold winter wind. As the limousine rolled to a stop, a Russian lieutenant stepped forward to open the door, and came to attention.</p><p>Calmly, and quite deliberately, a woman in her finest wizarding robes—surmounting her professional muggle business attire—stepped out of the car, her hair blonde shot through with black.</p><p>“Madame Malfoy, welcome to Zhovtneve!” A delegation of generals were waiting for her, and she toured the troops drawn up over the old marshalling yard, and exchanged pleasantries with them. They were all on the Russian side of the dividing line, of course, which was the main line between Kiev and Poltava.</p><p>The entire affair took about thirty minutes. During the review, Narcissa maintained a serene and reserved composure, though she didn’t really feel it. It was just something, a military formality, which she had to wait through.</p><p>On the other side of the tracks was her territory, at least temporarily. The ‘area of operations’ of her Army, which was close enough. Obviously, there was also her Army over there. Her wizards and witches, who had chosen to defect from Voldemort, which was good enough for her.</p><p>Her sister.</p><p>The goodbyes could not be short enough, but had to be long, with all the formality accorded to visiting dignitaries, now that she was a real Head of Government, in the way that counted—the command of Army divisions. She had to wait through all of this, and did, with a calm and composed expression, making the necessary formalities, a sort of muggle social ritual.</p><p>Then, with her knot of aides, she carefully walked across the main line of the railroad, which marked the dividing line between the Russian area of operations and that of the Black Guards. And as she negotiated the last of the snow-covered rails— they had not finished enough repairs to start running trains again— she could see <em> her</em>, sheltering under the eaves of the station. Her sister. Surrounded by black-uniformed officers, and one individual in a MinKol uniform who Narcissa immediately realised must be Hermione Granger, she stood, the short lady in black with wild hair, looking so out of place. But t here she was. Her ridiculously short elder sister, dwarfed by the men—and women—around her, but absolutely in control.</p><p>Bella. Free at last of Voldemort.</p><p>Narcissa mustered the terrible weight of her calm and composure and pitted it against the emotions in her heart, and somehow, managed not to cry.</p><p>Bellatrix looked back, like a drowning woman at sea.</p><p>Narcissa paused, and drew herself up in front of the officers. “I thank you all for your courage in making this break with Voldemort. You have given Britain, and all the nations of western Europe, hope. You fight as free men now. I do not mean to trivialise that. The fighting will not stop, but at least you can be confident your cause is worth your trials, and that I shall be doing everything in my power to lead you toward the objective of the freedom of your lands and families. I will meet with you all, and hold discussions to understand the sense of the Army, though for the moment, I will speak with your commander, privately. ”</p><p>Then she took another step forward, and was greeted by a voice forced to be calm, in a trembling body that was anything but. Bellatrix. “Cissy…?”</p><p>“Come on, Bella. Let’s talk.”</p><p>“You’re all dismissed,” Bella ordered to the soldiers, and fell in beside Narcissa with Hermione close at hand. She could barely contain herself.</p><p>In the last day or so the station-master’s office had started to resemble a proper apartment for them, and it was warm inside, there was a desk, a couple of camp chairs, the old grand high-backed chair for the station-master, and the cots. A little desk with some packets of sweets and other things on it.</p><p>As much comfortable as could be found, in the moment. Narcissa dismissed her subordinates, and stepped inside. Bellatrix followed her, and then… Hermione, as well.</p><p>“Colonel Granger,” she observed, with a hint of surprise as Hermione closed the door behind them. She would have expected Bella to… That came together in her head fairly quickly. “Bella, you really did swear an unbreakable vow wit h.. Colonel Granger, didn’t you?”</p><p>“I did,” her older sister acknowledged, moving to sit in one of the camp chairs. Narcissa, acknowledging the moment of her sister recognising her dignity as the head of the Government-in-Exile, went to the high backed chair. Hermione didn’t sit until after Narcissa had.</p><p>The younger Black sister fixed a look on her. “Colonel, I would assume from the context of this shared room that you consider yourself bound to my sister for the sake of your own life by the terms of the oath?”</p><p>She wondered why Hermione had started to blush.</p><p>“Yes, Madame… Prime Minister?”</p><p>“That will do for now. Thank you. You may stay, then.” Narcissa noted Hermione’s look of relief, and then got up, and took three measured steps toward her sister.</p><p>And, to Bella’s evident surprise traced on her face—not like Narcissa cared at that point, the floodgates finally broken—the younger but taller sister leaned down, and folded her in a hug, squeezing her as hard as she could. “<em>Merlin</em>, God, Bella. You’re finally away from that terrible man. Thirty years, and… ”</p><p>Bella sat there, staring at the wall as if she were peering into history. She let Narcissa hug her, but the younger Black sister could feel her sister limp in her arms. She didn’t care. She knew that Bella was distant. “Would you forgive me?”</p><p>“Forgive you?” Bella jerked, and looked up to her sister. “For what?”</p><p>“For leaving you behind.”</p><p>“At least I got you out,” Bella shrugged into her sister’s arms.</p><p>Hermione got up. “I think I should go, anyway. You need time together, ladies.”</p><p>Bellatrix jerked toward Hermione as if she had only now remembered that the third woman was in the room. “Yes, Granger, you should go,” she said.</p><p>With that, the young witch quickly exited--almost with an indecent haste, though she was 'middle class'--and Narcissa was left to sigh. “I’m not sure she should have, in fact, left. It was her decisive action that saved your life, Bella,” she spoke after the door closed, and then slowly got up to pour herself some tea.</p><p>“Maybe I don’t want her here while we are talking about our childhood and our family,” Bellatrix answered, holding her head in her gloved hands. “I don’t want our childhood the common knowledge of <em>outsiders</em>, Cissy.”</p><p>Narcissa closed her eyes. She understood why her sister said what she did. “Alright, Bella. I respect that, of course. Where’s… Where’s Delphi?”</p><p>“She’s in the care of the household of the Actual State Councillor for Georgia,” Bellatrix answered.</p><p>“Another cup of tea, Bella?”</p><p>“Did you already send Mardy away?” Bella turned away.</p><p>“She returned last night, silly. You’re clearly taking care of yourself, since you didn’t notice,” Narcissa smiled as she began to make the second cup. She knew what her sister’s desire really was.</p><p>“It was hard for her, it made her feel bad--she could barely do anything to help us while we were in combat, moving fast, it’s not an elf’s job to maintain the inside of an APC … Merlin, I really kicked over the ant hill, didn’t I?”</p><p>“You only just now noticed?” A girlish giggle escaped Narcissa’s lips as she turned back to her sister with the tea. Properly ensconced with a cup each, they could sit and face each other. The warmth held the winter chill at bay, and Narcissa felt comfortable now.</p><p>Bellatrix closed her eyes and sank back in her chair. “Something like that, Cissy.”</p><p>Narcissa frowned. “You are quite out of it, Bella.” Her sister had not been well, but she was usually manic. Narcissa had never quite seen Bellatrix so… Subdued.</p><p>“Of course I am,” she snarled, and then sighed. “It wasn’t your fault they cut my arm off…”</p><p>“<em>They cut your arm off!</em>? ” Narcissa rocked back, paling. “But, Bella, I don’t understand..”</p><p>Bellatrix glared at her sister, and then reached over to her left hand with her right, and very slowly peeled the glove off, to reveal the gold artificial hand underneath.</p><p>“The Morsmordre,” Narcissa gasped, this time. “They excised it from you, didn’t they?”</p><p>“Some Kazakh steppe witch with a sword and bubbling black Siberian Shaman’s brews,” Bellatrix answered, eyes wild. “So now I am a ‘glorious mutilate’. Fat wonderful lot life has given me, to come and realise it was all a fucking waste to serve Voldemort so I can enjoy being in my fifties and scarred and missing my entire left arm. But I am truly free of Voldemort... ”</p><p>“And what does that mean for Draco, then?” Narcissa asked, she couldn’t help it, her mind wandered immediately to her son and to his own mark that he held, like the one that had been removed from Bellatrix by the terrible act of mutilation.</p><p>“He wasn’t there to have the mark strengthened by Voldemort through the dark rituals he has practiced since the seizure of power,” Bellatrix shrugged. “He’s probably fine, though Voldemort certainly knows where he is, but doesn’t care enough to try and kill him personally. Perhaps it will have to come off as well… You can give a fuck about your sister instead of immediately worrying about Draco, you know, he’ll be fine.” Bella glared.</p><p>Narcissa sucked in her breath. “We both care about our children, Bella. And I certainly care about my niece deeply, and I hope you do the same for…”</p><p>“Of course I love my favourite nephew,” Bella answered automatically. Of course, Draco was also her only nephew.</p><p>“<em>Bella…</em> ” Narcissa closed her eyes for a moment. “Well. I know as mothers we both want our children to be safe and happy, and that’s why you came over to us. I won’t diminish the fact that we share that. I’m <em>thankful</em> we share that. But of course I’m going to be worried about my son when you suggest he might someday need his arm amputated to stay truly free from Voldemort. ”</p><p>“I suppose.” Bella pulled the glove back on her hand with indecent haste. Narcissa could see that her sister was ashamed.</p><p>“They <em>will</em> think you wounded for the war. Maybe you should wear it proudly, so that people know you have sacrificed for the cause you now belong to,” Narcissa pressed gently.</p><p>“Maybe I should actually be whole so I can enjoy a life!” Bellatrix answered, getting flustered. “I won’t. I won’t.”</p><p>“I won’t press, then.” Narcissa avoided a sigh; this, petulant, easily angered, that was still pure Bella.</p><p>“Good.”</p><p>“I’m so thankful to have you as part of my family again, Bella.” Narcissa got up, and once more walked to her sister, setting her tea down. She put her hands out, offering the hug this time.</p><p>Bella put her own cup aside, got up, and fell into her sister’s arms. She settled in them for a while. “How did little Cissy grow up to be so tall and strong?”</p><p>Narcissa smiled, and leaned her head down against Bella’s. “You had a lot to do with it, Bella. Never doubt that.”</p><p>The two women again pulled back from each other to sit, going for their tea. Narcissa felt reassured that the sister she had grown up with was still there, regardless even if the madness that had been seen in the past was real, too. It was a part of her, but so was her resistance to Voldemort, her revolt. “ So what will you do, Bella?”</p><p>“I don’t know… There really isn’t any set of good options,” Bellatrix murmured.</p><p>“You mean for the war?”</p><p>“Oh, not that, I…” Bellatrix froze. “It’s nothing, Cissy. I don’t want to talk about it.”</p><p>“Then you don’t have to,” the younger sister stretched and frowned. There was still something odd going on. “Still, the war matters. We’re going to shorten the front that you’re operating on, so that your units can be refitted, and to give the Confederacy time to prepare supply lines for the equipment that was seized, since we cannot afford to replace it. If that’s what you’d rather talk about, I believe the new dividing line between the armies will be Zaporizhia…”</p><p>“No, that’s not what I’d rather talk about.”</p><p>“Well, if you don’t know what to do for your future,” Narcissa coolly pinned her sister with her eyes, “I need a General in command of my Armies.”</p><p>“I’ll take it, but that’s not it. Cissy, I heard from Granger that you’re,” she gritted her teeth, “<em>friends with Andromeda again</em>. After all she put us through, God, <em>why</em>?”</p><p><em> Is that it? Is that really it?</em> Narcissa’s face flushed with anger for a moment as she considered ascribing all of Bellatrix’s strange behaviour to her distaste with Andy. “ Yes, I’m friends with Andy again. I won’t say I’m on good terms with my <em> older</em> niece, but my grand-nephew is adorable and <em>our </em> sister is… <em>Our sister.</em> She lost her husband to this war, so did our niece. And Bella—we’re not going to have a future if we keep acting like purebloods.”</p><p>“You are a Malfoy,” Bella looked at her trenchantly. “You are a <em> Black</em>. You are <em>Pure.</em> And now you’re rejecting this? After all that we have suffered for the sake of it, it’s all—for nothing? Narcissa, I was so proud of you, if we get out of this alive, you’ll be the British Minister. ”</p><p>Narcissa couldn’t help it. She laughed, but it was not a kind laugh, and it brought Bella’s eyes to focus on her immediately. Good. “ Bella, my sister, you have ended the old system, the old ways, the old expectations forever. You and your fellow ‘Knights of Walpurgis’,” she said it gently, invoking better times for Bellatrix, “have ended the system. The statute of secrecy, the Ministries, it’s all kicked down. War decides the future now. If we are victorious, fighting alongside the CIS, then I warn you now, the muggles of Europe will be in power. And they will be vengeful. We will be slaves to them, we will be subjected to their legislation, and they will seek to contain and control our powers and end everything magical about us. A limited measure of magic will end up permitted, by tightly controlled wizards and witches, for what they define as the betterment of society. Anyone who reads recent muggle history knows that this is inevitable.”</p><p>Bellatrix had paled. “Then why, in the name of God why, do you fight with them?”</p><p>Narcissa smiled. “Because there was an alternative. I am not the British Minister of Magic in Exile. I am the British <em>Prime Minister</em> in Exile. At some level, you knew that from the intelligence briefings, you just ignored it. Now, my sister, I have taken to leading not merely the British Wizards and Witches in exile, but representing the whole British people. And I will not stop. As Oliver Cromwell said, ‘Necessity hath no law’. We are fortunate that you have given me an Army, because now I have real power to enact Necessity. The Statute of Secrecy will never come again. Instead, we must take measures to secure our position in society, and we have the advantage that the muggle elites of Britain have been corrupted into serving Voldemort. Even if it was with the Imperious curse, the average muggle in subjugation to His power <em>does not care</em>, Bella. There will be no forgiveness. But if I control the hangman’s noose and the Attainder of Parliament, then I am their path to Royal Clemency. So you see, I am going to save our houses, our people, and our children from subjugation to the Muggles. I am going to do it by taking power. We will do not what they want, but what is good for them. So I have taught myself to be polite and respectful with muggles, to joke with them, to listen politely and respectfully to them, to wear a little flag pin on my lapel and dress in muggle clothes. And in the circumstances, it is over and done with, <em> of course</em> we are personally <em>Toujours Pur</em>, but you know, like the Russian families, it will be better for us to act like conventional aristocrats, and to accept that all Wizards and Witches are our natural allies of necessity, and we will need the half-bloods and muggles to love and honour what we create for us to have a chance to survive. ”</p><p>With narrow eyes, Narcissa held her sister’s gaze sharply. “I am doing this for Draco. He will not be <em>anyone</em>’s slave. He will not be subjugated to <em>anyone.</em> My son has already suffered enough in this life, I will not let anyone come between me and this objective. And the imperative of this is – we magical people do not have any time left for fighting amongst ourselves, except the war of Voldemort against the world. I will use an Act of Parliament to make Nymphadora a noblewoman, if she wants it—I doubt she ever will. I will make her young son a Lord. But to get there, we must act like we care about the muggles. We must act like we respect their social conventions. We must act like we are not <em>beholden</em> to Voldemort’s ideology! And it <em>is </em>Voldemort's ideology, now in the eyes of the world, and so it shall forever remain. There's no changing that. And that, my dear sister, means that we must set aside our prejudice against half-bloods and muggle-borns, and grasp the nettle tightly. My reconciliation with Andy and her family is a political necessity.”</p><p>Bellatrix was looking at her younger sister with an empty tea cup dangling in her hand, frozen in place with her eyes wide and thoughtful. “She <em>hurt us,</em> Narcissa. If she hadn’t run off with that fucking mudblood man, father wouldn’t have had elves following us and reporting on us to ‘protect our virtue’, and…”</p><p>“I chose Lucius willingly. I was in love. So I moved fast and married young before another Alliance could be arranged which would give me someone I didn’t want. And yes, I left you alone, and yes… I’m sorry.” Narcissa looked down. “I am not going to marginalise the real pain you felt.”</p><p>“Good, because I’ve just spent my entire adult life a slave to it.” Bella paused for a beat, and slowly shook her head. “So you want me to associate with mudbloods. Merlin.”</p><p>“It would show your reform and your new, pure heart,” Narcissa answered with saccharine humour. “It would be good for the propaganda cameras.”</p><p>Bella laughed and shook her head. “Maybe.” It was almost coy. “You’ve done well for yourself, Cissy, but if you fail, we’re all going to be put against a wall and shot by the muggles.”</p><p>“No doubt,” Narcissa couldn’t help but smile with cool bemusement, though her look grew serious. “But sister, there are so many ways to fail. The solution to all of them is to succeed. You will command my Army?”</p><p>Bella giggled. Naturally she did. “Of course, Madame Prime Minister.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes:</p><p>Attainder -- a legislative act of the British Parliament providing, licitly, for punishment without a trial, because Parliamentary supremacy allows for the judgement to be held by Parliament. Not used in several hundred years, but Churchill proposed it for the punishment of the Nazis in WW2. "Attainted" is the term for someone who has been subject to an Act Attainder.</p><p>"Glorious Mutilate" -- this is an extremely literal translation of "Glorioso mutilado", the sobriquet given to José Millán Astray, the founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, for his lost limbs in combat. "Glorious Amputee" is a more common translation. Because of the presence of men like General Diaz in her forces who had served in the Spanish Legion, Bella would be familiar with the term. </p><p>If you ever click on a chapter right after I update, and the formatting is messed up, I am using OpenOffice to write this, and so I have to load them to the website, and then do some final formatting and then update. So refresh in about five minutes and the formatting should be fixed.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0034"><h2>34. When the Music Stops...</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-Four: When the Music Stops...</p><p> </p><p>Hermione had gone outside of the train station and had a smoke. The Russians on the other side of the tracks, she quickly realised, would have papirosas, and with a guilty desire for the strong, unfiltered cigarettes instead of the garbage she had been bumming off of the Black Guard officers, she wandered across the tracks, procured herself a pack of belomors, and socialised for a bit in Russian. Names, families, places you’d seen or lived in; the victory, whether or not there’d be any renewed offensive before winter ended, it was all mindless chatter, really, but it kept her distracted for a nice little while. There wasn’t that much liquor flowing yet, these were staff officers, still on the front, still in an active combat zone. They would party and celebrate when they got rotated to the rear, though certainly, if she had gone further away from the headquarters, to men on the front lines, she could have found as much samogon as she should have liked. But for now, the smoke was enough, the feeling of the victory almost overwhelming.</p><p>She didn’t want to think about it anymore, not really. Hermione supposed she should be more thankful. They were all standing around catching up with the reality of the greatest victory in the war against Voldemort to date. There was actually a lot of work to do, but most of it was by the rear echelon troops. It was a real chance to rest, unless they were involved in more exploitation operations.</p><p>Hermione was not sure what her official assignment was anymore. She wasn’t sure what they had put in for her papers when she had volunteered to go off with Bellatrix. Quite possibly it said something like “Liaison Officer”, which, of course, meant that she would not be going anywhere anytime soon. At least as long as Bellatrix was in command of the Army, she would be with Bellatrix.</p><p>The young witch stood in the lee of one of the abandoned locomotives in the marshalling yard, sheltered from the savage wind, and smoked papirosa after papirosa. She looked at the logo of the Ukrainian State Railways, overmarked with the Morsmordre, and silently shook her head. Sometimes the shock of it all was overwhelming. Since the age of eleven she had been inoculated into the idea that a wizard or witch needed to maintain the statute of secrecy at all costs. Until adulthood, she had begun to divorce herself from what she had learned in her childhood.</p><p>In her early childhood, it had been British Rail instead of the Hogwarts Express. The Class 125s had given way to the magic of the steam train at Kings Cross. Now, the old Soviet locomotives that had been repainted many times according to the politics of the day, reminded her that these two worlds had collided irrevocably.</p><p>She looked down at the little red light on the end of the cigarette as she drew a nice sharp drag into her lungs. The cold was really starting to get to her. The sun had already gone down, and the thermometer was dropping fast.</p><p>Hermione walked back across the tracks, smoking down the last cigarette. She headed in for the chow line, feeling ravenous from the cold. Russian rations had arrived for the Black Guards now as their own were running low. There was buckwheat mixed with beef, heated up from the can, and chicken pate on buckwheat crackers, and strawberry kisel, since for her, it was too late for tea. The familiar flavours of the CIS rations were comforting. They reminded her of the much simpler life at the front she had had in China with the 27<sup>th </sup> Division, before the reassignment to the Kavkaz had brought her to this fate.</p><p>To Bellatrix Black’s bed.</p><p>Despite Narcissa’s presence, as far as Hermione knew, her cot was still next to Bella’s. She finished her food and went up to the room, wondering if she would find the sisters still awake and talking. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to speak with them or not. A part of her was screaming that she should just run away, request reassignment, get as far from Bellatrix as possible. Bella was right; this wasn’t going to work, and it wasn’t going to work anywhere, and she’d been crazier than Luna to go this far with it.</p><p>Then there was the part of her that just wanted to make out with Bella in front of Narcissa, so that there was no going back.</p><p><em> And if I don’t protect her and she dies, I die. </em> That had seemed like an easier bullet to chew to she hadn’t been Bella’s lover. Now it felt like there was no way to break up with her. At the door, she could clearly see that the lights were on, and there was still talking from inside the room. Hesitating at the door--it seemed indeterminably stupid. She was a soldier now, and she acted decisively. With a soft puff of breath, she reached out and knocked on it.</p><p>“Come in, Granger.” Bella’s voice sounded muffled through the door.</p><p>Hermione couldn’t help but shiver a little that she had been recognised. She opened the door. “Thank you, Bellatrix.”</p><p>The two women were sitting close, drinking tea. They had evidently planned on a late night. Of course, a samovar had been procured, because instant coffee and packs of tea would not do for the Prime Minister of a Government-in-Exile. It had probably been seized from someone’s home, where it had been abandoned, in the town. Such was war – the precious possessions of fleeing refugees, abandoned in the ruins of their past lives and compelled to serve Generals and Stateswomen.</p><p>“ Ma’am,” Hermione addressed Narcissa politely. “I hope I didn’t return too soon, but I..”</p><p>“Nonsense, Bella and I have been talking in here for hours and hours, and your bed is set up next to my sister’s,” Narcissa answered with a wave of her hand. “Though, you’re welcome to some tea if you want to rival us for bad decisions.” She smiled that kind of indulgent smile an aristocratic woman could have so well, and Hermione was lost in the moment.</p><p>“Of course I would,” she answered, and accepted the tea. Speaking of the way the two worlds she had lived in had collided, Narcissa Malfoy leading the British Government in Exile remained high on the list of a graphic example. Hermione itched to ask Narcissa what her policy agenda would be when she evicted Voldemort from London, but decided it would be very bad form.</p><p>For a moment, it was just the three women looking at each other, one much younger than the others.</p><p>“ Where will we go next?” Hermione finally asked. That got her a look from Narcissa.</p><p>“You are something like tied at the hip,” Narcissa acknowledged after a moment. “Most of the Army will be pulled off the front line to refit. While that is going on, we need to establish a functional staff. Colonel Granger, I sent a message earlier today in response to our earlier conversation, and have already confirmed that you are assigned as the head of the Liaison Staff to the British Army. It is quite the role and you will have your own entire staff to manage, it’s not merely a MinKol responsibility, but a combined forces one. Of course, it will take time to organise.”</p><p>Hermione sucked in her breath. It was quite the fillip, to be in charge of the entire liaison staff. Of course, it was take an enormous organisational effort, but wasn’t that exactly what she had always wanted to have the opportunity to prove herself capable of doing, capable of being a leader and an administrator? It wasn’t the Ministry, and there would never be a Ministry like it again, but it was a serious responsibility.</p><p>“Of course it will be an honour to accomplish. And it does mean I can stay close to Bellatrix for the sake of the oath.”</p><p>“Yes, for the sake of the oath,” Bellatrix drawled with a hint of sarcasm.</p><p>Hermione ignored her for the moment, and pressed on in talking with Narcissa. “We will be going to Astana to establish the staff?”</p><p>“Yes. We really need Bella to meet with Stavka anyway, and it’s a good opportunity for us to all rest. My home in the city is small, certainly, but it's tidy and pretty, and large enough for Bella and I at any rate, and visiting officer’s quarters will certainly be available for you nearby in the city, Colonel Granger.”</p><p>Freedom. Freedom <em> from </em> Bella. Close enough to oblige by her oath, far enough to have her own place. Hermione stole a look toward Bellatrix. The older witch’s expression was hooded, quiet. She didn’t say a word.</p><p>Hermione needed the time. Anyway, the idea of living, of having some kind of simulcra of a normal home life, with Bellatrix and Narcissa… Was unfathomable, so it was best not to fathom it. She nodded politely. “I’m certain it can be arranged if you’re operating out of Astana, and my orders in MinKol assign me as the head of the liaison detachment.”</p><p>“Certainly,” Narcissa shrugged. To her, the matter had been covered adequately.</p><p>Bellatrix smiled lazily. “You can accompany us back via the floo network, Granger – well, we’ll have to travel back east until we reach an intact floo – to pick up Delphini. Then we’ll all travel directly to Astana. As near to direct as we can, anyway.”</p><p>“I want to see her myself as soon as possible,” Narcissa added. “It’s nice to be an aunt.”</p><p>“She is absolutely adorable,” Hermione agreed, even if the girl’s innocent use of ‘mudblood’ was still worthy of grimace… She really wished that Bellatrix had not already taught her daughter that word. <em> Assuming it wasn’t the Rowles. It’s not like everyone left in magical Britain isn’t bigoted or something. </em> But it was wishful thinking. It had almost certainly been Bellatrix. Or both of them at once.</p><p>“The heiress to House Black,” Bellatrix continued airily.</p><p>Hermione wondered if Narcissa really intended to confirm Voldemort’s decree, but the woman gave absolutely no sign of anything but acceptance of her sister. Narcissa seemed loving toward her sister, and Bellatrix seemed content and relaxed, in a way they had been only in their most intimate moments.</p><p>Perhaps having both Hermione and Narcissa nearby kept the cold of Azkaban away from her soul for a while. “ It’ll be nice to see her and her little cousin Teddy playing together. They’re almost the same age,” she decided to offer with a warm smile to Bellatrix, not really sure if it was completely sincere, or if she were goading her lover, a bit.</p><p>Bellatrix’s expression froze. She grimaced. “Cissy, the child of a werewolf?” She rather pointedly ignored Hermione and went for her sister.</p><p>Narcissa sat her cup down. “Andy is in Nizhniy. But she will come to visit. The child is a metamorphamagus like his mother, but not a werewolf.”</p><p>Bellatrix sank down in her chair. “Well.” She looked so small and thin in that moment, as if the mania of the campaign had deflated and left her for what she was. A woman of 158cm, who had ‘celebrated’ her 50 <sup> th </sup> birthday a year before, alone, leading an Army.</p><p>Hermione wasn’t sure if she felt sympathy, though, considering that Bellatrix’s entire affected depression at the moment was over pure bigotry toward members of her own family.</p><p>“Well, perhaps it’s been enough. We’ll all feel better when we get to Astana, I am sure,” Narcissa smiled. “Since your beds are here, I should leave you to sleep.”</p><p><em> Does she know? Does she suspect? </em> Hermione gibbered suddenly, not sure how transparent it was—or if Bellatrix had decided to just blatantly tell her sister something like ‘oh, I went for a roll in the mud with the Granger girl’. She was terrified of being found out, wondering if her whole life might stop should everyone, all of her friends—who at the moment she didn’t even know if they were dead or alive, that was always the case in war when on different assignments—discover that she had committed such a sin as to make love with Bellatrix Black.</p><p>A perfectly frozen look consumed her face, and she waved automatically goodbye to Narcissa, before the door closed behind the dignified witch. Then she could feel Bellatrix’s eyes on her.</p><p>“I told you it was going to be over, and it’s over. Don’t be so mewling and stupid, she’ll suspect something that isn’t there. Isn’t there now,” Bellatrix amended with a choked off cackle.</p><p>“Really? That’s all I get?” Hermione snapped back. <em> In the allied forces, she’s technically my superior officer. I shouldn’t start mouthing her off. </em> “So here we are, we’ve made love thrice, …”</p><p>“Fucked,” Bellatrix interjected crudely. “We’ve <em> fucked </em> thrice.”</p><p>Hermione gritted her teeth and got up to brush her teeth in the bowl converted to a wash-basin, using another next to it to splash water across her face. She pulled her inner jacket off and the uniform tunic below it, and turned back to Bella, her hair longer than five centimetres again, only a bra and her uniform trousers on. “I was trying to put as good of a spin as possible on sex where I wasn’t even allowed to see you naked--the woman I’d lusted after for my entire adult life. Kind of a sad fuck, that.”</p><p>Bellatrix rolled her eyes and moved to her bed.</p><p>“You know you smell, right? Right up until you remember to cast some spell to make it go away? And I just didn’t care…”</p><p>“Maybe I forgot how to take care of myself in fucking Azkaban,” Bellatrix answered trenchantly. “Also, magic. Better, easier and more convenient than all of the little muggle toys you won’t give up. Go ahead and make up your mind about whether or not you’re going to insult me or beg for me back, Granger.”</p><p>“Maybe,” Hermione’s eyes flashed over to tears, “I can’t help but have it be both.”</p><p>“Go to bed, Granger. I need you.” She pulled the sheets over herself and tried to stretch out on her cot.</p><p>Hermione, wiping the tears from her eyes every few minutes, finished getting ready to sleep and followed Bellatrix to bed. She settled into her own cot, pulled the blanket over, and cried herself to sleep, wondering why she had ever tried to love the insane witch, the former Lieutenant of Voldemort himself, the woman who had carved <em> Mudblood </em> into her arm…</p><p><em> Because love doesn’t make sense, and don’t try to pretend that it does. You can only make the best of it. </em> Maybe she was free now, it was over, she could find someone else…</p><p>Reflecting on that thought in the morning, nothing seemed more hollow, or more cruel, for in the night, as she had every single night, in her sleep, Bellatrix had thrown herself up into Hermione like a drowning woman reaching for a life ring. They woken up nestled close together, and as it always was, there were no screams or discomforted moans when Hermione was there, but they started as soon as she left Bellatrix’s side. It left Hermione feeling terrible about the prospect of leaving Bella.</p><p>But of course, when she woke up, Bellatrix would deny it, just like she always did.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>For all that she felt exhausted, and emotionally confused, it was a <em> good </em> thing to return to <em>Shinaarsi</em>, ‘contentment’, the named Manor of the Dadiani. The snow was heavy on the ground now, even here. The trees bent away; the magic birds swept the path, and little magic lights floated through the dimness of the grove, because with the clouds and snow overhead, even in daylight, there would be little light otherwise.</p><p>Bellatrix had this distant expression on her face, at once reserved and urgent. One could see from the intensity of her expression, still perfect despite the lines on her face, that the moment was significant for her. Of course it was. She was coming back to her daughter, when she had last left Delphini not at all confident that she would ever see her again.</p><p>Then a sharp young girl’s voice split the night. “MUM!” A little hand in a knit glove was waving between the row of banisters along the upper porch.</p><p>Bellatrix stopped. Narcissa stopped. Hermione stopped. They all stared for a moment, halted from where they had been walking in from where the Floo network had delivered them to the fireplace in the gatehouse, not the manor—a sensible security precaution to a pureblood manor in the Russian lands.</p><p>Now the inconvenience seemed not to matter at all, especially to Bellatrix.</p><p>The waving child was of course Delphini, and a smile, reflecting a surge of happiness as well as relief, split Bellatrix’s face and banished the lines and wrinkles. “Darling, leap down and mum will make sure you land safe!” She called out.</p><p>“...Sure!” Delphini climbed up on the rail and flung herself over. Unlike at a muggle household, none of the Dadiani’s servants attempted to stop her or expressed a shout of shock or concern.</p><p>With a bright grin, Bellatrix brought her wand up and magically made sure of her daughter’s gentle coasting descent—right into her mother’s waiting arms. “Well there you go, my little witch. Safer than on the ground!” She declared, spinning Delphini, before presenting her to Narcissa.</p><p>“Say hello to Auntie Cissy,” she said proudly and winked. “Your mum’s little kid sister.”</p><p>Narcissa had such a bright look, Hermione never imagined Narcissa Malfoy being called a ‘little kid sister’ until then, but the woman was genuinely happy.</p><p>Delphini looked suspicious. “Mum, she’s taller than you are!”</p><p>“But she’s younger, too. So she’s always the kid sister,” Bellatrix assured her daughter.</p><p>Delphini’s face scrunched up as she thought about it for a moment, and then brightened. “Mum is silly sometimes, but you’ve got to be Auntie Cissy, right?”</p><p>“Indeed I am, young witch,” Narcissa agreed, a bright smile firmly fixed to her features. “ Your mother is a very special woman to me, my elder sister who kept me safe when I was little.”</p><p>Bellatrix put her daughter down, and Hermione shivered, seeing the tears on the older woman’s face. “C’mon, Delphi,” she instructed. “Let’s go inside before you catch cold. How has the Master of the House been treating you…?”</p><p>“Grandpa Vasya has been teaching me Russian and the history of Russian magic, too!” Delphi declared brightly.</p><p>“<em>So now you know Russian?” </em> Hermione dared.</p><p>Delphi whirled a look at her. “<em>Yes I do.</em>” She squinted at the rank tabs for a moment. “<em>Colonel?</em>”</p><p>“<em>Yes, or rather, Councillor of Witchcraft, but that’s the same,” </em> Hermione answered. “<em>You learn fast.” </em></p><p>“You’re Colonel Granger, aren’t you?” Delphi continued. “From the breakfast where mum said she’d lost her arm.” She glanced suspiciously at her mother’s left arm, as if she didn’t quite believe that it was really a magical replacement, that the story had been something other than a tale her mother had made up to shock her.</p><p>“I am,” Hermione agreed.</p><p>“Mum, why didn’t you introduce me to her? I want someone to practice my Russian with!”</p><p>Bellatrix rolled her eyes. “Brilliant,” she said with a trace of sarcasm, “at this rate my daughter shall end up in the Black Court of Koldovstoretz instead of Slytherin.”</p><p>“That would be so wonderful, though, mum!”</p><p>“Perhaps,” Bellatrix now allowed herself to smile indulgently as they walked up to the engraved and iron-bossed doors. “At any rate, Colonel Granger is going to be around us for quite some time, because she is your mother’s bodyguard and Aide-de-Camp. At any rate! What have you been learning about the history of magic in these parts, then, my brilliant young witch?”</p><p>“Well, today, grandpa Vasya taught me about the Simurgh!” She exclaimed, as the doors smoothly swung open for them to enter, and wend their way up to where they could remove their boots and outer coats, and then, Master Flyorov would receive them, with tea in the samovar, and a selection of cakes and pastries of both Russian and Georgian origin.</p><p>“I see you’re telling her of the Simurgh,” Bellatrix immediately observed, bluntly, to Vasily Flyorov. “You, of course, realise that’s no mere myth.”</p><p>“Of course it is not,” Flyorov agreed with a laugh. “As it happens, our ancestors were rational and sensible people, who recorded things rationally and fairly, within their limits of perception. The Simurgh was real. Perhaps <em> is </em> real.”</p><p>“Just like the lake of Anahit,” Bellatrix murmured.</p><p>Narcissa looked from one side to the other. “The Lake of Anahit?”</p><p>Hermione chimed in. “It’s in Bellatrix’s agreement. She’s allowed to have our help to seek it. It’s supposed to be the original source of the Water of Life.”</p><p>“Mmmn.” Narcissa pursed her lips, and looked intently at her sister. “The source of Koschei’s rather transitory immortality.”</p><p>“I just want to wash Azkaban out of my bones,” Bellatrix answered with a sneer. “You would do the same, sister, if you had been sent there.” She rose. “Enough of this. I do not need my motivations questioned.”</p><p>“Nobody questioned anything, Bellatrix…” Hermione sighed.</p><p>“Silence, Granger!”</p><p>“Please,” Flyorov forced a polite smile. “Madame Black, you are a welcome guest, the record of your effort in the past weeks to stand against Voldemort is all you need here. May we get anything special for you?”</p><p>“I understand Georgian wines are very good,” Bellatrix, who had eschewed the tea, answered idly, sinking into her chair as if abruptly deflated.</p><p>Flyorov pulled a bell cord to summon one of the house servants. “Bring her one of the 1960 Saperavis,” he instructed, graciously.</p><p>“The ones meant for Khrushchev’s table, Master Flyorov?”</p><p>“Yes, exactly," he agreed.</p><p>“Of course, Master Flyorov."</p><p>“House elves are more convenient,” Bellatrix remarked. “Of course, <em> Colonel Granger </em> would just try to liberate them.”</p><p>Flyorov smiled very thinly. “Madame Black, I am was a communist myself, and in some respects, I still am.”</p><p>The irritated flush that Bellatrix showed in response was in some way cute, and Hermione hid her irresistible grin, hopefully successfully, behind the silvered podstakannik which held her glass of tea. Bella didn’t turn to glare at her, so she had probably succeeded.</p><p>The older witch looked at the dark, heavy ink of the wine. “I will need to find the time between what you have planned for me, Narcissa,” she addressed her sister formally. “Not in winter, of course. The lake is certainly at the top of a high mountain, and I cannot be sure it would be possible to find then.” She drank deeply of the goblet she had been presented with.</p><p>“No more shouting, mum?” Delphini asked as she came up to the side of Bellatrix’s chair, looking intently to her.</p><p>Insomuch as Bellatrix had been agitated before, she calmed immediately, and offered a wan smile. “Yes, my darling, no shouting.”</p><p>Hermione, still not sure whether or not to agonise over the fact she was single again, still found it the cutest thing ever. Honestly, anything involving Bellatrix and her daughter was. It was simple and humanising and so easy, in those moments, to forget all Bellatrix had done. Which made it easier to forgive herself for what she had just gotten herself into for the past few weeks…</p><p>“Of course, the arrangements can be made, at least in the summer, though the needs of the offensive will come first,” Narcissa finally answered, her own eyes distracted to her niece. “Will you trust me to do so?”</p><p>“No, but I will make myself wait,” Bellatrix acknowledged, before tussling her daughter’s hair between sips of wine. “I understand that I have the biggest bulls-eye on the planet on my back right now. I am the first of Voldemort’s servants to have escaped his mark. There will be plenty of people coming after me.”</p><p>“They’ll have to get through your <em> bodyguard </em> first,” Delphini nodded seriously, and pointed to Hermione. “ But maybe daddy will give up eventually, right?”</p><p>All the adults exchanged glances. Flyorov had tried, very gently, but of course, explaining to Delphini, and getting her to appreciate, that her father was not at all a good man, was not easy. Euphemia Rowle, unlike Bellatrix, had not spent the past few years on the front, steadily disenchanted, and had certainly shared a rosy picture of Voldemort with Bella’s daughter. It made Hermione’s heart ache.</p><p>“I’m sure it will all be all right, soon enough,” Bellatrix smiled, but it did not reach her eyes. She extended the goblet she had just drained toward one of the servants, and commanded him with only a single word:</p><p>“More.”</p><p>That made Hermione’s heart ache, too.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes:<br/>- Italicized full sentences are meant to indicate Russian-language speech in otherwise a chapter where the characters would predominantly be speaking in English.<br/>- A podstakannik is a metal holder for a glass, with the glass containing a hot beverage, which is the normal way tea is consumed in the Russian lands and other East Slavic cultures.<br/>- Samogon is Russian bootleg liquor, moonshine, essentially.<br/>- Kisel can best be described as a rather runny jello that you an drink. It's amazingly tasty. It's basically berry juice with corn or potato starch added, prepared hot usually, but you can also pour it over ice cream.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0035"><h2>35. ...Everything Stops.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-Five: ...Everything Stops.</p><p> </p><p>“Cissy, what <em> is </em> this!?” Bellatrix was glaring in disgust at the clothes laid out in the bedroom of their now shared home. As crazy as it had been for Bella to realise they now had muggles for neighbours.</p><p>Narcissa frowned. Generally, things were very good. Even though it was just half of the original house, it was quite spacious for the two sisters and Delphini , and they had Mardy to keep house for them. They had settled in quickly and been able to relax, a little, but Bella’s participation in strategic affairs of the CIS was now necessary, and with it, this conversation.</p><p>“It’s a uniform, Bella. I had it made for you off your measurements.”</p><p>“A uniform. A Muggle Military Uniform.” Bella turned to her. “No! I won’t wear it. Are you absolutely daft?! You want your sister to wear a <em> muggle military uniform? </em> ”</p><p>“It even comes with a holster for a swagger stick that you can use for your wand,” Narcissa answered, dryly, and then turned serious. “Of course I want you to wear a muggle military uniform. I want you to look like you are serious about being the commander of the British Army in Russia. It’s important.”</p><p>“You <em> have </em> gone daft, Cissy.” Bella glared and folded her arms. “I like my corsets, and my skirts, and I like <em> black </em> very much, thank you. Also I’d have to do something ghastly with my hair to make it fit under that awful hat.”</p><p>“Bella, you agreed to obey me as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.” Narcissa felt a somewhat growing real frustration.</p><p>In response, Bella sat down on the bed like a child who had been told she was grounded. “Cissy, I spent fourteen damn years in Azkaban and now you want me to go around wearing a <em> uniform </em> ? I wore a uniform there, too.”</p><p>“A <em> prison </em> uniform. This one is one of honour. <em> General </em> Black.” Narcissa threw her hands down at her sides. “Damn it all, Bella, don’t be ridiculous. When we meet with President Nazarbayev, I want you wearing the full dress uniform. And anyway, it <em> has </em> a skirt. It <em> has </em> black boots. Quite well polished ones, too. It just happens to be the symbol of the nation you’re now fighting for. The nation your own sister damned well leads in exile.”</p><p>“My sister who’s started wearing muggle business suits,” Bella sniffed. “Possibly I want to say that we’re both witches, you know.”</p><p>“You <em> never </em> wore witches’ robes, not after Hogwarts anyway,” Narcissa snorted her laughter. “Come off it, Bella. You’ll look fabulous in it. You might even get yourself a date with some Koldovstoretsy.”</p><p>“I’m not marrying another man,” Bella flashed a glare her sister’s way.</p><p>“Don’t. Find a woman instead, I remember.” Narcissa spun in front of Bella, looking down. “Merlin, Bella, I <em> have you back. </em> Do you think I’ve become the new enforcer of morality for the House Black? For British Wizarding society?”</p><p>“You seized as much power as you could, and are aiming to seize it all when we go back,” Bella couldn’t resist a ruthless little smirk. “So yes actually.”</p><p>Narcissa paused for a moment, and then smiled. “Alright, so say I <em> am </em> the enforcer of morality for British Wizarding society. Congratulations, we’ll let a Magister marry you to another <em> woman </em> when I’m done revising the law code. How does that sound?”</p><p>Bella jerked, and flushed a bit.</p><p>“Thought so,” Narcissa wandered over to one of the mirrors, and then turned to look back at her sister. “I mean it. Look, it’s just the way of the world. If you show up wearing that usual combination of your’s to official meetings here, nobody will take you seriously. Or will be immediately reminded you’re Voldemort’s defected lieutenant. Either way, it’s not productive. But I don’t care what you do in your personal life. And you really will look good in the uniform.”</p><p>“You … Wouldn’t care if I married another woman?”</p><p>“I believe that’s what I just said, sister,” Narcissa enunciated very clearly. “The old ways are dead, and my family and our future will not be dependent on following them. Clutching to them is like trying to swim to safety from a shipwreck with the family pearls. Best to get to shore instead, and find a way to regain them later.”</p><p>“Fine words,” Bella shivered and shook her head to the side, as if consumed for a moment with something. Narcissa thought, with a mental shudder of her own, that it was a wave seizing the flank of Azkaban, in some distant memory.</p><p>“I’ve always known that you were so inclined, Bella. I remember at Hogwarts. I never bore a grudge against that, or anything. You were my brave older sister.”</p><p>“Brave.” Bella shrieked with laughter. “That’s a fine word for a traitor.”</p><p>“Not a traitor to me, and family matters more than anything,” Narcissa smiled tightly. “Now come on, do your duty by the House of Black. Get up and get in this uniform, and show the world this new side of you.”</p><p>“I another five days, I’ll be <em> fifty-two, </em> Narcissa. This is a damned ridiculous age to start over at.”</p><p>“That implies you’re not confident that you’ll gain any benefit from this Lake of Anahit.”</p><p>“<em>If </em> we find it, If it can still be reached!” Bella bounded to her feet. “So here I am, and here you are, and there’s still this damned uniform in front of us.”</p><p>“Yes, because you’re going to put it on, because everything I’ve said is right.”</p><p>Bellatrix huffed, and with a sigh, stepped forward. “Help me with the corset, Cissy. Mardy is watching Delphi and we only have one elf.”</p><p>“Of course.” With a grin, Narcissa helped undress her sister.</p><p>“The whole House of Black has one elf between all of us,” Bellatrix muttered to herself as she undressed, a shiver going through her when she revealed her gold artificial left arm to her sister.</p><p>Narcissa did not flinch. In fact, the workmanship was excellent, and it was enchanted to be fully functional, and it was made of light gold sheeting, and inlaid with the runes which made it respond to the desires of the amputee it was linked to. In truth, what made her feel more regret was the hideous scar from the manacles of Azkaban that marred her right wrist, and the Azkaban tattoo—the brand of a prisoner of Azkaban—that still marred her sister’s flesh.</p><p><em> I will destroy that hideous place as a proclamation of my power over Britain, </em> Narcissa thought in a moment’s fit of black rage. But she meant it, no matter how short the fit was.</p><p>Then the uniform went on, the crisp military browns of the British Army, from the peaked cap to the ankle-length skirt, the leggings, the high black boots, with the tightly buckled black Sam Brown belt over it, and the black gloves that, with the assistance of silver cufflinks, succeeded in hiding Bella’s arm, with Narcissa helping her sister pull her hair back. It would never be regulation, but Generals could get away with such things if they wished, and Narcissa knew that anything more would be a lost battle with Bellatrix, anyhow.</p><p>It was just at that moment that the door-bell sounded.</p><p>“It’s probably Granger,” Bellatrix huffed. “Let’s go let her in.” She spun on heel—and the boots had several inches of lift to make Bella seem less tiny amongst the tall Army men she’d be dealing with—and stalked off to the door. “I’ve got it, Mardy, just take care of Delphi!” She called.</p><p>Narcissa decided to follow in her wake, and despite her longer stride, managed to reach the door only just in time to see it open.</p><p>Bella had, like she always tended to do, flung it open with a kind of violent energy. Standing in front of her was Hermione in her uniform as a Councillor of Witchcraft, which, because the Ministry of Magic had no equivalent table of ranks, meant to the British exiles she was simply a Colonel.</p><p>Hermione, seeing the woman in uniform before her, had instinctively come to attention. Then she had realised that it was Bellatrix, and she had frozen with a perfect blush on her face as she stuttered through “Ma’am—err—Bella---Bellatrix--err. General.”</p><p>Bellatrix leaned close and hissed: “Lay off it, Granger.”</p><p><em> What the devil? </em> Narcissa thought. <em> What is up with those two? </em></p><p>Hermione composed herself and smiled to Narcissa. “Ma’am, before … General Black and I get started on reviewing the status of forces agreement, I wanted to say that I received a message. Andromeda will be coming with Tonks—Dora, and Teddy, for Christmas tomorrow. They’ll be making their own arrangements to stay but they will be happy to visit for the whole day.”</p><p>Between the blanched look on Bellatrix’s face and her own combination of delight and worry at having to manage the situation, Narcissa temporarily forgot about the strange behaviour of the two women. Her sister was always strange, but the Granger girl, now that was another matter entirely...</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>There was a part of Hermione that wanted to very unhelpfully just blurt out in front of Narcissa that she had slept with Bellatrix. There was also another part of her that knew that was an absolutely terrible idea. In aristocratic pureblood culture, talking about sleeping around was the ultimate faux pas. Her own determinedly middle-class professional parents would have felt much the same about it, for that matter.</p><p>Bellatrix had declared it was over, but Hermione felt that she was the one who made that determination. Bellatrix was unstable, she was hurt and deranged by her years in Azkaban, and by her pure-blood ideology. Objectively, Bella was profoundly bigoted toward her. Hermione wanted the older witch anyway.</p><p>So she wasn’t going to quit, Bella didn’t have the right to tell her to stop.</p><p>There was something confident about that.</p><p>And today was the day that Bella would have to confront her blood relatives that she was <em> also </em> bigoted toward. <em> Interesting </em> didn’t begin to cover it. It was with a kind of hopeful confidence that she tugged at her sleeves and descended from the bus to go up to the charming little house, snug against the river in the midst of the cold, that Narcissa and Bella were now living in.</p><p>Waiting for a moment outside, the rest of the family caught up with her. There was Nymphadora, with pink hair and silver eyes, tall today, taller than usual. There was Andromeda, with an intensely reserved expression on her face, and Teddy hugged close by.</p><p>Behind them tailed Luna Lovegood, who spent a long time looking at the bus. Her presence both confused Hermione for a moment and quickly brought a grin to her face as they trudged through a light duting of snow on the broken sidewalk between the higher piles on either side, and the bus roared off in a cloud of black fumes.</p><p>“Andy, Dora, little Teddy… Luna! What are you doing here?”</p><p>“Well, the lack of any other family, mostly,” Luna answered matter of factly, hands shoved into the pockets of her uniform greatcoat. “Also the fact that Bellatrix’s offensive outran the armoured trains, so we are not needed at the moment. How are you, Hermione?”</p><p>“I’m fine, of course,” Hermione smiled, and proceeded to hug through the group, starting with Luna, whose plain confession of how alone she was made her wince.</p><p>“A women’s Christmas, without Draco here… it will make Cissy hurt, a bit, but she won’t dare admit it,” Andy observed as they went inside.</p><p>“I suppose he <em> is </em> still on the Norwegian front,” Hermione agreed. “It’s a damned shame, but at least there’s something for him to look forward to.”</p><p>“There’s that,” Andy agreed neutrally as they went up to the home, marked by the gently glowing scrollwork around the doors, as a signifier of a magical presence. “Hermione… How is Bella?”</p><p>“Well. Even last night she was working,” Hermione answered. “Easily upset, but that’s always Bella.”</p><p>“I’m glad you’re at least on good terms. Delphi…?”</p><p>“Precocious, and handling it well so far,” Hermione nodded, and then they were at the door, and she felt pensive. She was putting on her best face, but honestly she wasn’t sure if there would be an eruption between Andy and Bella or not.</p><p>And then the door was opened in front of them. Narcissa was made up as well as she could be. “Andy, Dora..” She smiled, and then reached down to pick her grand-nephew up. “Teddy!”</p><p>“Auntie Cissa!” he answered enthusiastically.</p><p>Hermione trailed in with the others.</p><p>“Welcome, Miss Lovegood,” Narcissa even offered, recovering quickly at her presence. “It is always good to see another Briton.”</p><p>“Oh, well, I suppose I am,” Luna nodded affably.</p><p>Narcissa and Andromeda leaned close together as they entered into the dining room. The samovar was hot, and there was bread and butter and samosas on the table—the last, filled with horsemeat and onions, a nod to local cuisine, for the want of something else. Mardy was working on finishing the main course.</p><p>And Bella was there, sitting on a chair off to the side of the table, with a cup of tea in hand. She was wearing her General’s uniform, and that made everyone freeze, on both sides. Bella froze, too, the tea in hand, looking across a gap of two metres – the gap which now was all that remained between Bellatrix and Andromeda.</p><p>Hermione set her cap on the end table, moving first. She ran her hand through the few inches of intensely frizzy and kinky hair which had reappeared and that she hadn’t had the heart to shave back into a buzz cut yet. “Maybe we should sit and all drink some tea?” she offered, delicately.</p><p>“Bella,” Andy began, and stepped around the table.</p><p>With a trembling hand, Bella, wearing a glove on her artificial left hand like usual even in these different clothes, put her tea down. The room seemed sepia-tinged for a moment, as Andy reached out to her sister. Bella… Took her hand, but only with the gloved one.</p><p>Andromeda pursed her lips, like she was going to ask, but instead decided to respond to that smallest of steps, and folded both of her hands around Bella’s. “Thirty years,” she said simply.</p><p>With a start, Hermione realised that the two sisters had <em> literally </em> not even <em> seen </em> each other in <em> thirty years. </em> Not in person, certainly. It seemed almost unfathomably sad.</p><p>For Bella, the emotions were more complex. She tugged her hand loose. She sat back down, her eyes looking up, grey-tinged with thoughtful intensity, at the sister who, except in the colour of her hair, was almost her identical twin. Andromeda was, though, younger and less worn. Her hair was plainer, straighter, and didn’t flatter her as well as Bella’s did her, but nobody would ever call her anything except for pretty.</p><p>For all that, there was at least no envy visible on Bella’s face. Instead, she sat back down, and picked up her tea. Together, the two sisters had not said anything else, save Andromeda’s declaration.</p><p>“We should all sit at table,” Narcissa finally interjected, trying to keep her look as inscrutable as a proper Malfoy matron should, but there was something in the tone that did not come out quite right, a wistful longing.</p><p>Hermione and Nymphadora sat down together, then Luna on the side of them.</p><p>“Are you okay?” Dora asked in a hushed whisper, as she saw the others sit, but Andromeda still standing close to Bella, who was still sitting away from the table, now again holding her teacup, as if it were a shield against her sister, and the world.</p><p>“For the circumstances,” Hermione acknowledged with a whisper back.</p><p>“Has she … How bad has it been with her?”</p><p>“I’ve held my own,” Hermione answered with a nervous, tight smile. Tonks was one of the people in her life that she manifestly didn’t want to know about her and Bellatrix.</p><p>“Fair.”</p><p>Relieved that the exchange was over, Hermione’s eyes flickered to the two sisters.</p><p>“Was it worth it, Andy?” Bella asked, finally, with bitterness in her voice.</p><p>“I’m not going to lie to you, Bella. It was. Even now that he’s cold in the ground, it was worth it. I’m reminded of how worth it those twenty-five beautiful years were, every time I look at my daughter and grandson.” Andromeda was a <em> Black. </em> She did not back down, though her voice was gentle. For a chopped, clipped moment of time, the two stared at each other when Andy answered her older sister like that.</p><p>Bella drained the rest of her tea in a single gulp. “Nice to know that one of us did something fucking worth it.”</p><p>Then Delphi came out of the kitchen with Mardy, the house elf fussing over the ‘young mistress’ insisting on helping with bringing out the Christmas Feast, sparse though it was.</p><p>Andy looked at her sister. “Don’t give me that rot, Bella. We’re looking at what was worth it for you, right now. And she’s lovely. Hey, Delphi, let me help with those plates…” The middle Black sister started off.</p><p>“Madame Tonks should <em> especially </em> not help Mardy!” the house elf squawked. Bringing dinner out early had made sense, to avoid a fight.</p><p>Hermione grinned and winked to Tonks. “Just a sec, Dora,” she offered as she got up and wandered over. “Well, I’m General Black’s Aide-de-Camp, so I’ll <em>Aid</em> with Dinner," she played on the words in English.</p><p>Narcissa had managed to find a goose—perhaps it was a gift from President Nazarbayev—which had made for the Christmas Roast. There was cranberry varenye to make up for the lack of the traditional English cranberry sauce. Parsnips were normally served, and the recipe had been adapted to the classic braised parsnips with smetana. They also had bread, and pickled cabbage, and a nice pot of gravy. This, then, was a true luxury, even for Narcissa as a Prime Minister-in-Exile. She looked relieved that she could play hostess to her family in at least some measure of what they would have had together in the Black Family Manor…</p><p>...Neatly ignoring that half of the family in front of her would no longer be invited there.</p><p>Hermione having taken over for little Delphi in delivering the food, the girl went over to introduce herself to her cousin. It was then Bella looked nearly apoplectic for the first time, and Nymphadora’s lips tightened in a thin line. The pipes in the radiator banged as it turned on—like most things the central steam was not well maintained—and Andromeda used the distraction to interject. “I must say, Bella, you look very smart in the uniform.”</p><p>“You’d think so,” Bella answered with a faint smirk. “What with your love of muggle things.” But the smirk, if anything, seemed a little thankful. “I have all these damned flatterers around me,” she sidelong glanced toward Hermione, and the young witch stiffened at Bella’s gaze, as the older woman continued, “and they all seem intent on convincing me that I missed my calling in a Sam Brown Belt.”</p><p>“Well, your name …”</p><p>“I know, I know,” Bella waved her hand and re-filled her tea. “I understand you’ve been… Working in a factory. How … Pedestrian, dear.”</p><p>“It’s important work,” Andy reached out.</p><p>Despite a glare that passed between the two women at Bella’s derisive snort in reply, Bella did let her sister refill her tea with breaking the peace.</p><p>“You don’t believe that. Go find some Kitchen Witch to do it. You’re a Black. You deserved a life of power. Not… Those ghastly little muggle cars your husband still drove even after finding out he was a wizard.”</p><p>Andy closed her eyes and Hermione could hear her whispering a count to three on her breath. “I understand that you ride in muggle cars all the time now, Bella.”</p><p>“Big ones, and frequently armoured. You probably have a Lada, now.” Bella teased her sister over her tea.</p><p>“If only the situation wasn’t so bad, so that I could have one. But even an old Lada is a privilege now, with the rationing,” Andy answered stiffly. “And you just called me a Black, Bella. Does that mean you’d put me back on the family tapestry?”</p><p>Now, Bella was really put on the spot, and she looked like a cornered animal as she started at her sister. <em> Come on, Bella, </em> Hermione found herself wishing. <em> Show that you care. Somehow. Please? Andy needs this. </em></p><p>“Yes.” The word slipped from Bella’s lips like a haunted whisper.</p><p>Andromeda Black Tonks began to cry, softly at first, and then in shuddering sobs, as her daughter reached out to hug her. Narcissa got up, and hastened to go around the table and embrace Andromeda as well, so that the middle sister was being hugged from both sides.</p><p>And Bella sat, wordless, sipping her tea, with a look that betrayed that she had found something she was scared of—her own word, freely given to her own sister.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>For all the evident tension, it was a wonderful dinner, well-made in the circumstances, and everyone managed to stay polite through eating. This seemed like a minor miracle, and Narcissa had shifted to sit next to Andromeda, where she was hugging her sister through most of the afternoon. Bella was mostly silent, but she did not stop Delphi from playing with Teddy after dinner.</p><p>Bella couldn’t help but look at the closeness between Andy and Cissy with a deep suspicion. Hermione didn’t know why, but she could see the flashes of frustration. The two sisters could, as well, and it built through the evening as they drank their tea. There was the knot of Luna--who hid toward the back a bit, considering it was otherwise family, Dora and Hermione, and there was Cissy and Andy, and there was Bella, sitting by herself in a high-backed chair.</p><p>Hermione wondered at Cissy and Andy. She had been worried, sometimes, about the sincerity of the reunion between the two, but their behaviour on this night seemed to dispel any such concerns.</p><p>She had not been the only one confused by it. And unlike Hermione, whatever tact Bellatrix had been born with had left long ago, stripped away in Azkaban or even before. Bella leaned back and crossed her legs, the stockings swishing as the skirt shifted—Hermione shivered.</p><p>“So, Cissy, did you <em> really </em> mean what you told me back in the Ukraine? Because here we are, and I think we’re meant to be a family again. But you triangulate, you prevaricate, you please both sides, just like you always did with father. You’ve always got to be perfect while getting what you want, too.”</p><p>The lights flickered, and Hermione wondered if it was just bad mains supply, or a magical energy from a flustered and angry witch.</p><p>Andy’s lips stiffened into a circle, and shifted slightly, and looked to Cissy. “What’s she talking about?”</p><p>That look of aristocratic hauteur on Narcissa’s face held for a moment, the exasperation at her sister’s lack of control, it was all familiar, Hermione remembered it from the Malfoy Manor, even. <em> Whatever their conversation was, it took only the first meeting with Andy for Bella to spill it. </em> Still, she wanted to know, herself, she was a little scared to know herself, and so she was thankful for Bella’s lack of interest at keeping any kind of secrets, her willingness to just say and do anything she felt like.</p><p>That honesty, which stemmed from the same source as Bella’s instability, was part of why Hermione loved her, she realised in a flash of insight. There were plenty of people over the years who for various reasons had said awful things about her. She had been hated for being a mudblood, and she had been treated with contempt for her hair, which betrayed the expectations and conformism expected of her, even before she had gone to Hogwarts. She had been hated for being a girl, too, especially since she was a very smart one.</p><p>Bella had hated her and never made a single pretence about it. When they had made love, Hermione was left with the impression this was also absolutely sincere. With Bella, she knew <em> exactly where she stood, </em> there was no false kindness hiding private thoughts tainted with blood supremacy or other biases. There was simply the honesty of someone who didn’t have the time or patience in life to bother with lying. If she had to teach Bella to be good to her, she knew exactly what the challenge was … Nothing would ever be hidden from her.</p><p>Then the conversation in front of her erupted. The howling of a gust of wind across the city lent the moment an eerie inevitability.</p><p>“Our dearest baby sister intends to rule Britain,” Bella was saying, dryly. “She said being friends with you again would <em> look good for the cameras. </em> That’s true, but it’s also a load of shit. Cissy clearly loves the hell out of you again, as if the past thirty years were just the blink of an eye.”</p><p>Put on the spot, with Andy and Nymphadora and yes, Hermione all looking at her now, Narcissa’s perfect poise finally failed her. She tentatively sank into the opposite arm of the worn old couch from Andy. “Bella, you misinterpreted me,” she finally allowed. “I did indeed say that it would be good for the cameras, which is an objective truth. However, …”</p><p>“Yes, I’m <em> sure </em> we’ll now here how that wasn’t <em> quite </em> all the story,” Bella rolled her eyes.</p><p>“I’ve lost Lucius, I want my sisters!” Narcissa exclaimed and leapt to her feet. “ <em> Merlin, </em> Bella, but with how you’ve spent the past <em> three decades, </em> I thought that admitting to you that I was friends with Andy again would possibly drive you away from me. And I am selfish, all right? I am selfish—I want to love both of you! I want my sisters!”</p><p>“And the cameras? The propaganda for the British muggles?” Bella took more tea, and her look showed that she was baiting her sister. “What’s an act with you, Cissy, and what’s the truth?”</p><p>“I’m going to save the lot of us from being against the wall,” Cissy answered, pointing her finger at Bella—then Andy, then Nymphadora, her eyes flashing with an intensity that had been forged in grief, loss, hardship, desperation. “All of you. My sisters. My son. My nieces. My grand-nephew. Yes. I will use our public relationships for the maximum advantage. We are the House of Black, we all know that this must happen. I will not apologise for it. But that doesn’t make my love for you, Andy, insincere. Nor does it make the fact that it’s a political benefit insincere when I told you that, Bella. Both things were true.”</p><p>“You just omitted what you didn’t want me to hear,” Bella shrugged.</p><p>Narcissa sank back down to the couch. “Yes.”</p><p>“Don’t fucking do that anymore, Cissy. Trust that I’m actually capable of recognising the situation I’m in and reacting to it. I am not a goddamned caricature. I am your elder sister.” She hung the glass in her fingers to the side of her chair and kicked her legs down.</p><p>“Be kind to her,” Andy interjected. “Please, Bella. I understand why she did it. I want you here, too. And I’m okay with showing up in some photographs for Cissy if it makes the world a better place, I <em> know </em> she’s trying to save Wizarding Britain. And that’s worth it. I’m capable of telling when my sisters sincerely love me.”</p><p>“Is that so?” Bella asked neutrally. “Well, I’m glad you can forgive Cissy. It’s a bit harder for me to forgive the both of you for abandoning me.”</p><p>“I didn’t abandon you, Bella,” Andy answered levelly. She didn’t try to prevaricate on the issue like Cissy had. She faced her older sister, the two in appearance so similar and in personality oftentimes so different, down that small space. The two sisters stared at each other. “Bella, I have a right to love whom I please. My marriage was lawful before God and Ministry alike, and true to my heart. I got what I wanted out of life, and my only regret is that your damned friends put Ted into the ground years before I should have had to say goodbye. You are the one who owes me an apology for keeping such terrible company, but, because I want your love in this life, I will not demand it—perhaps these amends will be made in the hereafter, that will be enough. But if you are willing to love your sister despite the fact she still wears a <em> mudblood’s,</em>” and she used the term with a sneering contempt for the term itself, “wedding ring, and will until the day she dies, then… I want my sister back. If you can have me back after, as our parents put it, I ‘let that dirty blood inside myself’. Can you?”</p><p>“You misestimate me, Andy,” Bella answered with trenchant sarcasm lacing her voice. “In fact, I always just wanted to thread the needle. Nothing has mattered more to me than my freedom. You got it by running away. I got it by serving Voldemort. We are, in fact, equals in this matter, and I am not such a crazy wreck that I am incapable of recognising that. I, too, have gone for a roll in the mud.”</p><p>Narcissa’s face lost all expression, and then, after a single heartbeat’s moment, she flung to the left, and looked straightaway at Hermione, who had already frozen in place with a blush rising on her cheeks.</p><p>Bella had already seen it, and broke down cackling in her chair.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes:</p><p>Sam Brown Belt -- this is a belt with a crossed shoulder strap to support more weight, usually from a sword or pistol. It's characteristic of British military uniforms.<br/>Varenye -- whole-fruit preserves.<br/>Smetana -- a sour cream closer to the French creme fraiche.<br/>Swagger stick -- a short stick held by military officers during parades as a signalling and symbolic device.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0036"><h2>36. Coping Mechanisms</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-Six: Coping Mechanisms</p><p> </p><p>Nymphadora Tonks froze sharply in place at the words, and her aunt’s vicious, unrestrained cackling. The room was punctuated only by that noise, everyone else was silent. Narcissa stared sharply at Hermione, and for a moment, the younger witch wondered if Bella’s youngest sister was about to erupt at her.</p><p>Then Dora got up, and purposefully walked in front of Hermione, turning and extending her arm. “Come on, ‘mione, let’s go,” she said with an iron-banded force in her voice. Hermione barely could track with what was happening as Dora pulled her out of the room and toward the side of the house down the hall.</p><p>Bellatrix stopped cackling and her expression flared. “Tonks, <em> where are you taking her!? </em> ”</p><p>Narcissa, Hermione could barely see behind her, turned to look at Bellatrix instead. “Bella, just <em> be quiet, </em> NOTHING you do is helping right now!”</p><p>Nymphadora pushed Hermione into Draco’s unused small bedroom and closed the door. She turned on the lights, and gestured to the bed. They both sat.</p><p>“Dora,” Hermione began, “this is…”</p><p>Nymphadora looked at her with sharp, intense eyes. “I have one critical question before all the others, ‘Mione. Did she rape you?”</p><p>Hermione’s brown eyes flashed with anger. “No. I made my own choices, as stupid as they were. Tonks, I thought I was going to die! Die there with the only person on my side – Bellatrix. I wanted her. And, I… Damn It, but ever since she tortured me in the Malfoy Manor, I’ve had fantasies about that night, where instead of carving up my arm she fucks me instead. I have never even had a single opportunity to go on a date with another woman. But Bellatrix was <em> there, </em> and very willing.”</p><p>Nymphadora paused. She didn’t react to her old preferred name being used – her own demons were distracted by the situation in front of her. “Hermione, did she tell you about her own past?”</p><p>“Yes, she did, actually,” the younger woman nodded, and then reached out to squeeze Dora into a hug. “Thank you. The fact that you cared enough to put me here and insist on an answer to that question matters a lot.”</p><p>Nymphadora hugged her back fiercely. “Mione, you have been through so much shit. You have never had a chance to grow up and be normal. Is this…”</p><p>“It was kind of a relationship for a couple of weeks, during the advance to Poltava from the Crimean,” Hermione explained. “But Bella ended it after that. I thought it was because she didn’t want anyone to know. But a part of me knew how unstable she was, and worried she would blurt it out like this. ” A sigh shook her body. “I-I didn’t want you to know. Or Ginny. Or her mother.”</p><p>“I … Mione, you’re my friend, you’re like family to me and my mother. We’ve been comrades in this war for countless years now. Dumbledore’s Army is still fighting as long as we’re here alongside the Russians, right?” Dora sighed. “But, I can’t ignore the fact that Bellatrix is a war criminal. I know why you did what you did, though. You didn’t want to die alone. You created a connection with her at a needy and desperate time for you, so you could fight with the confidence that you wouldn’t die alone. And because of that, you survived, and now you’ve got yourself into this situation. I’m not condemning that. Fun, happiness, most everything worth living for has been ground up in this war, and you took a chance to get some where you could. Good on you.”</p><p>“There’s a ‘but’ coming, Tonks,” Hermione smiled wryly, wiping at her eyes, and still leaning against the metamorphmagus.</p><p>“Eh, it’s mostly the whole War Criminal thing, and not on a large and abstract scale either, but the cackling ‘I tortured the Longbottoms and I’m proud of it’ way. Neville gave up his life to save mine. From that woman, ‘Mione. <em> From that very same woman. </em> She destroyed that family, first by agonising inches and then by a killing curse.”</p><p>Hermione bit her lip. “You’re right of course, Tonks. Please let me keep calling you Tonks right now? I need it…” She leaned into her embrace.</p><p>“Yes. It’s fine,” Nymphadora acknowledged after a long pause. “Look, the best thing to do is move on. I don’t think anyone would be absolutely furious at you if you did. To be honest, Molly Weasley will be happy that you broke up with Ron for being a lesbian, instead of…”</p><p>Hermione pulled back to rub her hands through her hair. It was getting long enough it was causing problems for the uniform caps, which weren’t at all designed for it. She’d either have to grow it out and put the effort into making it comply with the grooming standards of the Russian Armed Forces—which were not really designed for the kind of hair she had—or else cut it short again. The thinking about something so mundane provided a blessed distraction, but she had to speak.</p><p>“Tonks, I really did leave Ron over Chisinau. He…”</p><p>“I know about it,” Dora shrugged. “Fair. But maybe just let Molly think something comforting. She’s lost enough.”</p><p>“Also fair,” Hermione forced a smile to her lips and shifted on the bed to fold her legs up into a lotus posture. “So what do you think I should do?”</p><p>“Move on,” Dora nodded. “Was it.. I mean, were you happy? Satisfied?” A bit of the old Tonks was there on her needling grin, as Hermione blushed.</p><p>“Amazingly so,” she admitted to Dora, who started softly cackling.</p><p>“Should have known my aunt would be good at that,” Dora shook her head in bemusement. “Well, good. You’ve learned, you derived something positive from it. Not begrudging you that, either. So, can I possibly help set you up with some cute Russian girl? The best thing to do is to just find a real relationship with someone else, and leave Bellatrix to making Narcissa feel really awkward in meetings.”</p><p>The problem was that Dora’s cackle sounded a lot like Bella’s, and as absurd and stupid as it was, Hermione felt herself in love with that voice. She forced a pained smile onto her lips. “I’m not sure. There’s still a lot of emotions about this. I know she’s a bad person, but Azkaban… Tonks, she didn’t deserve that. Nobody did.”</p><p>“And she’s free from Azkaban and she’s not ever going back. You know that even if the CIS decided to punish her, because of their public commitments, it would be an ‘accident’ of the kind that can be arranged for prominent people. They’re usually quick deaths and she’s certainly never going back to Azkaban either way. But she’s also a virulent blood supremacist. I didn’t drag you into this room and ask you about whether or not it was consensual as a paranoia. It was a question that had to be asked, because of behaviour that Bellatrix, for her entire life, has <em> chosen </em> to act on. I have difficulty believing that’s the grounds for anything other than cruelty on her part and heartbreak on your’s, even if she held it together and acted respectable for a while.”</p><p>Hermione swallowed dryly and fell back on the bed. “You’re probably right, Tonks, but can I come to this of my own accord, in my own time? Right now, it was Bella who broke things off, and my heart isn’t there yet, but that makes me safe to sort my own head out, right?”</p><p>Nymphadora’s expression twisted to a grimace for a moment, but then she nodded. “Alright. I have to assume the smartest woman I know, who has stood up for the rights of others, isn’t going to let a Death Eater control her. I’ll be here for you. To do anything, but mostly to just give you a place to cry. We’ve all had to be so strong for so long… At least I had <em> some </em> time with Remus. You’ve never known anything but war, and that’s pretty fucked up.”</p><p>“I kind of liked it that way until Bellatrix stormed her way back into my life,” Hermione admitted with a wry grin.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The moment that the door had closed behind Nymphadora and Hermione, Narcissa had gotten up and walked over to Bellatrix. Her older sister looked at her oddly from where she sat, having refilled her glass of wine in the meanwhile.</p><p>“Put that down,” Narcissa said coolly. “It’s just an excuse to avoid talking to me.”</p><p>Bella slowly lowered the glass to the end table. Andy looked on, her expression drawn.</p><p>Narcissa extended her hand to her sister. Bella took it, and was hauled up.</p><p>Andromeda rose as well, to start after them, as Narcissa took her sister toward her bedroom. Behind them, Luna looked around, and then rather practically wandered off to play with Delphi and Teddy.</p><p>“Andy…” Narcissa began.</p><p>“No, Cissy, I need to be here. We’re <em> all </em> sisters.” The door closed behind her as she followed Bella and Cissy into the room. The movement ended a moment later as Bellatrix was breathing heavy, sitting on the bed with her sisters on each side of her.</p><p>“Are you going to let me hug you?” Andy asked.</p><p>Bella nodded, without speaking.</p><p>“Thank you for admitting that, Bella,” Andy said as she folded her arms around her sister. “It was very brave of you, and …”</p><p>Narcissa had nothing of so comfortable a look on <em> her </em> face. Andy looked straightaway at her, and Cissy felt necessary to ask the question she was dreading. “Bella, I fear I have to ask,” Narcissa began, tentatively, and was immediately cut off.</p><p>“No! I didn’t rape her! I am <em> not </em> a rapist! Murderer, torturer, terrorist, thief, fine, whatever, go ahead and call me all of that, but I’m <em> not </em> a rapist, and I’d kill anyone who did that to Gr-Granger,” she trembled, her face flush with anger. “Everyone in the damned wizarding world thinks consent is meant to be laughed away by a potion. That’s not me, that’s never me. Let alone more forceful ways.”</p><p>“Please forgive me, Bella,” a chastened Narcissa fell against her sister’s side, grimacing, smarting inside, but having lived for a moment in fear of the idea of Hermione being able to bring this perfect dream crashing down.</p><p>“I have fallen low enough that it bears suspicion,” Bellatrix then spoke again—and admitted her own fault , shocking both of her sisters, as she reached out to fold an arm around Narcissa. “So no holding it against you, Cissy.”</p><p><em> She is right, she is self-aware of all of this, she’s not deceiving herself, </em> Narcissa thought in considerable, stunned sympathy. Really, Bellatrix might have felt that way for quite a while, but it was always so hard to tell with her, especially after she had escaped from Azkaban.</p><p>“It was all Hermione, for the record, though of course I thought her attractive and agreed of my own volition. She came to me, she begged me. <em> Nobody </em> has wanted me after Azkaban. Voldemort didn’t even pity me, it was a—a favour to a loyal subordinate, a few passionless minutes. She <em> wanted me. </em> Me.” Bella laughed, her eyes wide and manic.</p><p>“It probably has something to do with the fact that most fifty-two year old women would kill to look like you, Bella,” Narcissa offered, trying to get back on even ground with her sister.</p><p>“Fine, fine.” Bellatrix hung her head between them, and Narcissa heard her sniffling. “Sisters, I came to it honestly. It was a stupid fling with a mudblood, but …”</p><p>“Shhh.” Andy leaned hard into her from the other side. “You don’t need to apologise, certainly not to me. To be honest, Bella… I’m happy. Though we need to work on the slurs.”</p><p>“You would be. Maybe I was talking to Narcissa,” Bellatrix answered with a return of her characteristic whimsical petulance.</p><p>“Are you… Actively involved with her, Bella?” Narcissa asked carefully, then, trying to sound out where the entire situation stood.</p><p>“No, I broke it off. It lasted a few weeks, it was nice, but I’m not going to…” She trailed off, and Narcissa thought there might be real embarrassment on her face. It was probably going to be another mudblood dig that would insult Andy’s dead husband, and Bellatrix was actually capable of stopping herself from blurting it out.</p><p>Andy figured as much, but tried to deal with it gently and with compassion. She pressed herself in against her sister, and reached out to gently grab her shoulders and force Bella to meet her with a look to her eyes. “Bellatrix, that young woman is another human being and another witch just like you.”</p><p>“<em>I know…</em>” Bella trailed off, and added, “...except when I don’t. But I tried. Mudblood or not, she deserved to enjoy herself, when she was making herself so vulnerable to me. So don’t think I was awful to her or something else churlish like that.”</p><p>“Well… It’s not a problem,” Narcissa finally acknowledged with a thoughtful tone. “If you left her solely to avoid opprobrium… That’s not exactly a problem. First of all, let me be absolutely clear that I accept you, just like Andromeda, even if you are having a relationship with a muggle-born. The time for that to matter has passed, it’s water under the bridge.”</p><p>She cleared her throat, and continued with the more delicate, tempting words that her mind had seized on. “In fact, Bella, having a relationship with Hermione Granger would probably be the best public relations move you could make . Nothing to show your reform like being publicly involved with a member of the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore’s Army, in a relationship the pureblood world would condemn, with a muggle-born woman.”</p><p>“CISSY!” It was Andy’s turn to erupt. “Will you stop acting so perfectly base and cunning about all of these family matters !? You shouldn’t be encouraging this! It was fine, and perhaps even good, for Bella to be with this young woman, but that would be – it would be a nightmare for Hermione, especially if you milked it for publicity, however subtly.”</p><p>Narcissa sighed and pushed herself to her feet to pace. “Andy, you may not appreciate it, but purebloods marry for political advantage. Nobles marry for political advantage. It’s always been a part of who we are. We can’t just neglect the potential simply because it’s distasteful to talk about.”</p><p>“Cissy, sit down. Nobody controls what I do with my own body anymore,” Bella said, quietly, she didn’t lose her cool, but firmly. It was a combination so rare from her sister in the modern day, that it brought Narcissa up short. “ I think you owe me another apology,” she continued. “You’re not father and mother just because you decided to replace the Muggle-in-Chief. And I love you precisely because I <em> know </em> you’re not father and mother, so don’t make an ass of yourself trying to pretend.”</p><p>“I am sorry,” Cissy answered after a moment, and then turned, and fiercely hugged her older sister, and it was then <em> she </em> started to cry. “Damn it all, Bella. But I am trying to save you from the hangman, or maybe if they’re particularly polite about it, the firing squad, or if they haven’t quite worked themselves up to breaking their word openly, an ever-so-accidental fall from a balcony. I am doing everything I can, but I’m looking for other things too because I don’t trust anything I’ve done so far to be adequate.”</p><p>“Take power, and hold it, just like you said,” Bella shrugged. “It won’t be like before. You’ve got sources inside of England, you know how much everything has changed. Don’t… Don’t do the old pureblood thing of trying to find a way out by marriage. You are playing this game <em> well, </em> sister-mine. But don’t let it consume you.”</p><p>“I fear I shall have little choice in that matter,” Narcissa answered as she slumped back into a pile with her sisters. “I fear I shall have very little choice in that matter.”</p><p>“The two of you need to reach an accommodation,” Andy murmured. “Cissy’s trying her best for all of us, and she <em> is </em> the best to be in charge, which is unusual for you, Bella. But, Cissy, this is <em> our </em> Bella, not the Bella you knew in the Malfoy Manor after Azkaban. She’s got her daughter here, and she’s fully capable of recognising the predicament she’s in—aren’t you?”</p><p>“Most hated woman on the planet,” Bella agreed with a dark and bitter laugh. “Having offended both sides does that to you. Most of your colleagues won’t forgive me, and my former comrades certainly have no reason to ever even think of it.”</p><p>“I will find a way out,” Narcissa affirmed. “I <em> will. </em> Please let me trust you both to hear my ideas, both good and bad, and then answer them honestly. A leader has precious few she can confide in; my sisters are perhaps my only sounding boards I may trust.”</p><p>“That is a back-handed defence of your suggestion I have an open relationship with…” Bellatrix sighed, and forced herself to clearly enunciate the name: “Hermione. Isn’t it?”</p><p>“Yes, but a good one, I think.”</p><p>“<em>Merlin, </em> you’re terrible.” Bellatrix started laughing, tinged with hysteria. “Terrible. I love you. <em> I love you. </em> For centuries we would burn anyone off the tapestry, including Andy, who consorted with muggleborns. You just gave it all up for the sake of family.”</p><p>“Family is everything, I would be nothing without it. The hour is late, the sword is over our heads. Let’s stay close together, my sisters,” Narcissa finished, “For if we don’t have each other and our children, what do we have?”</p><p>“Agreed,” Andy nodded firmly. “And I do support you, Bella. I support you in <em> not </em> being involved with Hermione. If you don’t have a relationship that’s healthy for both people in it, it won’t be healthy for either of you. And …”</p><p>“I can’t un-think what I have been for my entire waking life,” Bellatrix agreed. “Though for some reason, muggles and muggle born don’t really have the same dirty wickedness to me that they used to have. I will be gentle. She does deserve it. And we will have to work closely, no matter what. Though, whatever Tonks is saying to her…”</p><p>“My daughter, Bella, will make her own choices. She will probably never forgive you, but she might come to tolerate the fact that you’re not imprisoned,” Andy explained, coolly, but gently. “You will need to graciously accept that if you want our family to be together again.”</p><p>Bella snorted. “Graciously accepting. Is that what they’re calling it now. I’ll go ahead and let your daughter tear me a new one. She is blood, after all.”</p><p>And for Bella to say that, so simply and so sincerely, about her half-blood niece, Narcissa knew that something had finally truly begun to change. She cursed her own efforts, even as she thought that they were perfectly sensible. The image was still a tempting one, of her sister so reformed that she lived a happy life, a lesbian marriage to a muggleborn as proof of her own journey and redemption. Getting people to accept her sister’s freedom would be like squeezing blood from stone, she would have to try everything in her power.</p><p>The only viable alternative was to simply be in a position where nobody could object.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>After a while, the two groups filtered back into the living room. The tidy little house still had one, as well as the dining room, kitchen, front entry, bathroom, restroom, and three bedrooms—but Narcissa was probably constitutionally incapable of appreciating just how fortunate she was, considering how it was still a massive step down from the Malfoy Manor.</p><p>Bellatrix couldn’t blame her sister, though that was very much <em>her </em>assumption. All in all, she had done better than Bella would have ever dreamed for her. She had all the tools and skills to succeed, and was learning her trade faster than most. It was a ruthless trade, with no quarter, but Bella had never known anything else in her life, and they would all just have to accept what fate had in store.</p><p>Bellatrix Black had never flinched from her fate.</p><p>She eschewed the wine, and got herself tea. Swirling in a bit of milk—perhaps from a mare, perhaps something else, but it had been fine so far—Bella tensed as Hermione and Nymphadora walked in, her niece’s arm around the shoulders of her former lover. An intemperate remark about stealing her girlfriend clawed at the back of her mind.</p><p><em> A shame, that would have really set Tonks off, </em> that part of her that could never resist teased with her as she forced it back inside. Instead, she forced herself to say words that she wasn’t quite sure if she actually meant. “Hermione Granger, I’m sorry for blathering in public about our relationship like a perfect lout.”</p><p>It made her sisters smile, Narcissa particularly relieved, and it brought a smile to the young witch’s lips as well.</p><p>“Thank you, Bellatrix,” Hermione offered, and carefully approached to get tea of her own. “Dora and I talked it out a lot. I am happy to continue serving as the Liaison Officer to your Headquarters. However, I don’t think our relationship would be appropriate to continue.”</p><p>“I already ended it,” Bellatrix snapped rather hotly, but then her expression softened. She reflected that she was hot over it because, at least physically, she wasn’t over Hermione at all. “I do understand. I’ll – you have earned a measure of trust from me. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t there, and I’m not going to pretend that you earned it some other way, though there’s no need to talk about it around others. I value your intelligence, and I value your commitment and the oath you have given me.”</p><p>“I’m actually honoured by those words.” Hermione paused and swallowed. She looked fragile, as if she were going to cry again, but had learned by long experience how not to. “Everyone always spoke of how far you had fallen, which incidentally meant from how high you had started. Personally, I’ve come to conclude that you’re still the Brightest Witch of Your Age. Together we can find a way to stop Voldemort. And I want you to have the opportunity to raise your daughter. I know I’ve earned your assessment—I know it’s not flattery. So I’ll consider it a compliment from the hardest grader I’ll ever face.”</p><p>Bellatrix couldn’t resist. It had been a bit of flattery, as she raised her teacup to her lips, and anyway, Hermione was standing there looking all eager and sincere. “Well, my dear, I… Intellectually, I have come to the point where I can acknowledge you are a capable witch.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Hermione halfway came to attention. “Tonks said I should request a week of leave from my duties as Liaison officer to recover and give us some distance. I am requesting it now.”</p><p>“Granted, I’ll find someone to make the paperwork go through,” Bellatrix sat down her teacup. “Go… Make yourself happy, I suppose, Granger. Hermione Granger.</p><p>“Thank you.” Hermione nodded to Tonks, and the two went to get Luna and Teddy and their coats. Bella could hear them thanking Narcissa for her hospitality at the door, after they left the room. She remained seated, sometimes glancing at the quiet Andy, who was watching her.</p><p>Then with a twitch of her fingers, she could resist no longer, and reached out, grabbing the wine goblet she had abandoned before, and drinking it straight through without a pause from start to finish.</p><p>Andy pursed her lips and shook her head slowly. “You still want Hermione, don’t you?”</p><p>Bella barely found it in herself to croak the word, especially with Andy, but maybe it was with Andy, where Narcissa couldn’t hear it, that she could actually have the courage to admit it, too. <em> Dirty mudblood fucking traitor bitch, </em> her mind meandered into a dark place as the wine hit, accusing herself truthfully of treason and betrayal of everything she had spent her adult life believing, but she nodded, and said it.</p><p>“Yes.” Then she turned to look at her middle sister, sharply. “Bring me more wine, Andy.”</p><p>Andy shook her head. “Bella, you have spent so long burning the candle from both ends. I don't know what's happened to you these thirty years, but take a chance that the future will be worth it. Just take a shower and go to sleep.”</p><p>But Bella had come to the uncomfortable realisation that without Hermione near her, she did not sleep well at all. The nights since she had ended the relationship had been lonely ones indeed, with the Screams echoing in her head.</p><p>Perhaps, of course, she deserved nothing less.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>-- I had originally intended to not write this chapter as such, and instead deal with the events after the christmas dinner with a retrospective from Hermione after a time skip. I felt from a sense of my readers that they wanted to see this, however, and so added the chapter to my plans, trying to be careful to reflect the complicated situation with the Sisters Black and Hermione and Hermione's friends. Hopefully I managed to stick the landing, but I can clarify and add nuance in later chapters, if necessary.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0037"><h2>37. Astana Nights</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-Seven : Astana Nights</p><p> </p><p>There were nightclubs in Astana, of course, and they served liquor. Kazakhs were not particularly observant Muslims, and there was a large Russian population, and Ukrainians and Germans too. They certainly offered an escape from the bitterly cold temperatures, though of course the quality of the liquor was dubious and almost all bootleg, and the food offerings were almost nonexistent. Still, people came, because being warm in an environment where they could forget about the situation in their lives and the world was important to them.</p><p>In this nuclear winter they had ‘enjoyed’ temperatures which, in the open plains, regularly dropped below -65C at night. In some ways, it was quite amazing that human civilisation could continue to function in those conditions. Coal, petroleum, they all helped keep the lifeblood of exertion, steel production, aluminium fabrication, electronic circuit board printing, all of it came down to heat.</p><p>Hermione sometimes wondered if she could ever pull enough around her to truly feel warm in the midst of that. Any kind of exertion helped, but even normal tasks were exertions in the bitter winter. Each time it cut just as hard as the first, and though this was her forth such winter, she wished for a day when the world might be healed enough that they were not quite so bitter. At least in a winter uniform ushanka she had dared to leave her hair a few inches long, with the frizzy mass growing in every direction serving to keep her head warm under the hat. From a co-worker in the Ministry of Defence she had finally found a reference to a woman who had settled in the city with her Kazakh husband after studying at Patrice Lumumba University before the Union fell, and she had directed Hermione to someone who could keep her hair at a fixed length to fit her uniform, and gotten her a small stash of hair products to help. Even in the depths of winter and war, life could look up.</p><p>That was the way that winter had gone by, planning, overseeing the re-equipping and refitting of multiple divisions, trying to create a cohesive new Army. Old names were revived, since the Janissaries were from all over Europe. The King’s German Legion was one of the most prominent, and with them the Royal American, and the Chasseurs Britannique. The Coldstream Guards, the Royal Scots, the Buffs, and the 47<sup> th </sup> Lancashire (a gesture to Bellatrix’s native part of Britain) were reconstituted for British units, as well as the 82<sup>nd </sup> the Prince of Wales’ Volunteers, and others. The bulk of the units, however, were organised under the broad name of Black’s Guards, exactly as they had proclaimed themselves in the Caucasus.</p><p>Very nearly every day, she saw Bellatrix. Her job was the complicated effort of being liaison, and coordinating, between the CIS armed forces and Bellatrix and her staff, and Hermione, quite frankly, enjoyed it. It was an enormous position of trust and responsibility for a young officer holding equivalent rank to a Lieutenant Colonel. She was frequently briefing General officers of the highest rank who had powers to make strategic decisions. She spent nearly as much time at the headquarters of Stavka as she did at Bellatrix’s headquarters, while they were in the city.</p><p>Bellatrix, of course, was always Bellatrix. Often curt, her biting wit was painful when directed against Hermione, and hilarious when directed against others. Sometimes, though, a softer side showed through: One time in February she had rather pointedly, in a moment when they were alone, complimented Hermione on her hair, and thinking about it still brought a shiver to her spine. She was <em> not over </em> Bellatrix.</p><p>More than two months now, March of 2003. She had survived to live in another year, and in another month, spring might even begin. Today hadn’t been much different than the days before, working on reports, attending meetings, making technical reviews of production data for equipment for the British Army in Russia, inspecting units passing through Astana on their way to other points . Spending time around Bellatrix the whole while, and she couldn’t avoid the fact that she still appreciated it, even if their relationship was ‘over’.</p><p>The was the problem. Deep inside, Hermione very much didn’t want her relationship with Bellatrix to be over , and she had even confided as much in Luna—the only person she trusted to be absolutely, utterly non-judgemental about it, and who was around and available for her to confide in. Hermione was making what she thought was a sincere effort to grow out of her deranged childhood crush, but her heart was fighting her every step of the way. All she could do was keep trying to put it out of her mind, and carry on with her duties, and the one ally she had was that her duties were actually kept interesting to her, and she was always willing to do more work.</p><p>Hermione had indulged, at least, to use some of her newfound influence to help some of her friends. Because she was also the commander of Bellatrix’s protection detail, which made perfect sense on account of oath binding her to the woman, she had arranged the transfer of her protection squad to her liaison staff as the security component. So now she was drinking in the corner of a nightclub with eight guys, trying to convince them why it was important to care about keeping Bellatrix Black alive.</p><p>Fortunately, this wasn’t as hard as it <em> could </em> have been. Vasya—Sergeant Vasily Korzhev was a reasonable and thoughtful guy, and definitely her friend. But she didn’t want to couch it in terms of keeping <em> herself </em> alive personally. That was too selfish. Instead, between drinks, she’d laid out the argument for why it was a critical task, because Bellatrix was the biggest target in the world, she put herself in danger regularly, but she was central to the function of her Army, which would save many lives in the CIS and had already made it possible to win many gains and liberate countless people. As long as she was breathing, what was shaping up to be fourteen divisions would fight for their cause. This, she had to distillate down to terms they all appreciated: It was a simple matter of less Russian blood being spilled, for as long as Bellatrix and her troops were in the fight.</p><p>Really, she needn’t have worried about it too much. She was drinking with Vasya and the squad in minutes, and they all understood the situation implicitly.</p><p>The veteran sergeant looked around to his men. “So we’ll be guarding this woman—this Death Eater. If you see someone who looks like one of our’s go for you – you will need to pull the trigger just the same. It might be a trick. It might be a madman.”</p><p>He got a row of nods from his men. “It’s war, of course.”</p><p>What those words meant. Hermione closed her eyes as the alcohol burned down her throat. They meant young men dying before their time. They meant women and children burned alive—that one brought a flinch to her.</p><p>Oh yes, she still remembered Chisinau.</p><p>It meant being on the embankment at Yalta, feeling your life leaching into the cold waters of the Black Sea, struggling to rise and grab at the concrete and the steel stanchions.</p><p>Hermione was barely even scratching the surface of war at that point, but what she remembered most of all in Yalta was Bellatrix saving her from the cold water. She blinked her eyes open, and looked around the table. “She’s saved my life. She was an enemy and she has been an evil woman, but you know I wouldn’t lie to you, guys. She knows how to act like a comrade, now that we’re on the same side. Whatever the shit she did in the past—and I know more of it than almost anyone, I think—she knows you keep watch on the back of the guy you’re fighting with. It’s why all of her Janissaries followed her.”</p><p>“You were right there with her on the front, right?”</p><p>“Yes,” Hermione affirmed, looking at the soldier who’d spoken. “Sasha—it was weeks. And she always led from the front.”</p><p>Vasya grunted and refilled Hermione’s cup. “You sound impressed. You’re not easily impressed.”</p><p><em> Fuck. Am I leading them astray? Is this my stupid heart talking? No, what you saw with the Janissaries was real. She will extend that to anyone under her command. </em> “I know her mettle,” Hermione answered. “She once held me prison in England, a long while ago. I wouldn’t speak to a change in her unless I knew it was real.”</p><p>“We’ll keep her alive,” he shrugged at last as they drank again. “For you. For her? She’ll earn it, or not.”</p><p>That was all Hermione could possibly ask for. Life in the CIS had been hard to start. There was less ingrained bitterness about the situation as she might expect from the exiles who could remember how much they had lost. “In hell we’ll be in good company, Vasya.” She raised her glass.</p><p>The grin told her everything she needed to know.</p><p>They drank until long into the night, and they all had to herd themselves up before the buses stopped running, with the wartime rationing. In fact, Hermione thought she was a little too late for a bus, especially after she’d stopped to smoke a cigarette, but her quarters were not far. She was about to start out on foot through the bitter night’s cold when another figure in uniform, with her coat drawn up close, stepped in alongside her.</p><p>“Mione, you’re going to freeze,” the woman’s voice said, so casually, and confidently.</p><p>“<em>Lara</em>!” Hermione exclaimed and flung her arms around the other woman. “You got leave?”</p><p>“We’re to reorganise the 27<sup>th </sup> before the spring operations,” Lara agreed with a nod as she readily embraced Hermione. “So we were rotated off the front.”</p><p>“Where are you staying?” Hermione asked, a flash of eagerness in her voice, she didn’t want to go back to the single officers’ accommodations, even though they were not bad, really, the shared bathrooms and showers didn’t leave her much more place to think than she’d had when she was Hogwarts, less, really.</p><p>“The Uzbek Embassy; a friend from Koldovstoretz—she was Red Court, but we got along well anyhow—is the liaison from the Uzbek Ministry to the CIS coordinating committee,” Larissa explained. “So I got her to give me a spare room, since we’re all one big happy family again,” she concluded with a grin. “Come on, we’ll apparate straightaway there.”</p><p>“Will you give me a choice…?”</p><p>“No,” Larissa admitted, and snapped out her wand. In a sense of falling through space and time and being drawn through something very narrow, which almost made Hermione throw up in her drunken state, they reappeared at the entrance to the Uzbek embassy.</p><p>A steadily greener Hermione was helped through after Larissa showed her pass to the guards, and managed to get Hermione to flash her own identity badge. Then they were both in.</p><p>“We’ll set you right again,” she said, far too damned chipper, as she presented a hangover cure potion to Hermione.</p><p>“What right do you have to be so damned <em> happy</em>?” Hermione grumbled as she drank the potion, which tasted like raw egg. She hoped that Lara was not playing a joke on her, and just giving her some cure that was a folk remedy with no actual magic in it.</p><p>“You know, catching up with all my Muslim and Tengriist friends from Koldovstoretz, so I haven’t been drinking late into the night like you, Mione,” she grinned, flung off her coat to the rack—helped Hermione with her’s—and then sat, crossing her legs and watching as Hermione carefully found herself down into a chair as well. “Instead, just hyped up on endless tea and slightly buzzed with kumis. So… How are things with you, personally? ”</p><p>“I should feel guilty about the fact you’re using your connections among Koldovstoretsy to make life easier for yourself,” Hermione answered, changing the subject as hard as she could. “The Uzbek Embassy, though, of all places?”</p><p>“If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else. Anyway, there are negotiations right now, and my uncle is involved in them. Now that we have reconquered territory of Belarus and the Ukraine, we will need to go from Governments-in-Exile to Provisional Governments. They have agreed to the Union Treaty that President Nazarbayev put forward, like everyone else but the Baltics and Moldavia have as well. But of course, it’s the devil in the details. At least we have the eastern part of the Ukraine only at the moment—this will make it easier. Belarus is never the problem.”</p><p>Hermione felt that geostrategic affairs or even internal Union politics were a much better thing for her to be thinking about than anything else, and through the dim cloud of alcohol she asked Larissa to continue. “Larissa, go on – remind me of the framework behind this.”</p><p>“Right, there were two attempts to save a Union. The first one was Gorbachev’s Union Treaty,” she answered, rather dispassionately, but also sympathetically. “Gorbachev… Was secretly a Christian despite leading the communist party, and at heart was a good man. He tried to save our <em> Rossiskiy Mir, </em> as part of the process of ending the communist system, but he was undone by two tensions pushing in opposition directions. The first is that Russia is much larger and more powerful than the other members of the Union. So in terms of population and economic potential, it’s hard to keep Russia from getting a decisive say in the affairs of the Union. Why would Russians want to give up part of the control of their country to others who have their own autonomous governments? I believe in Britain before the war, this was called the West Lothian Question.”</p><p>“It was,” Hermione agreed. “It essentially asked why should MPs from Scotland be able to vote on the minute details of English life if English MPs couldn’t do the same for Scotland?”</p><p>“Right. The second thing is that, of course, the rulers of all of these countries no longer wanted to be accountable. Many of them did not actually care about their countries and whether or not they became impoverished because of separation, they simply wanted to retain power at all costs.” Larissa waved her wand ostentatiously at the teapot, to get it boiling. “So the first effort foundered once the second most powerful Republic—the one alone that might have been a counterweight to Russia—voted to leave, because of the western nationalists. And yes, that’s the Ukraine. But then you get this complicated situation where the leadership of the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia all tried to create a closer Slavic Union—an initiative of Yeltsin, after the Union State collapsed. But it foundered quickly without even the formal documents. Still, we sorcerers were all more of a community than our kolslep compatriots, I suppose; we agreed to terms to keep MinKol together for the eastern Slavic lands. And then the Union finished exploding and we were stuck with a Ministry that crossed the borders, just like your’s in Ireland.”</p><p>“So the trick now..” Hermione rubbed her head. A part of her wanted to sleep, a part of her wanted to talk. She was probably going to make bad decisions.</p><p>“Exactly that. So, you know that it was a disaster when the war started,” Larissa laughed, darkly. “There was Boris Yeltsin, drunk in the Kremlin. The missiles were flying. But Voldemort had infiltrators in the state security apparatus—not many, we are good at our jobs. The Actual State Councillor was aware of the magical nature of the attack, and therefore had a small amount of advanced warning. The only way to properly protect the nation was with the anti-ballistic missile defensive forces. This required using nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere of our own country to ‘neutron poison’ the nuclear weapons descending on us. The action had to be taken immediately. So he went to the Kremlin personally—and there was Yeltsin, with the officers trying to sober him up. He had to magically take control of the situation to order the defensive apparatus into motion. But, it was done. Unlike in another circumstance, where many other Ministries tried to use the normal legal means, and convincing people, there was no convincing to do in Russia—it is one of those dark ironies that we survived the attack more intact than other countries because our President was obviously incapacitated, so the Actual State Councillor did not waste time reasoning, and simply took control and issued orders. And that was how President Nazarbayev ended up in charge—there was a leadership gap in Russia, and he was the man of the hour. And it would have never worked otherwise, because having the ruler of Kazakhstan in charge played as much safer to the other Republics than Russia formally leading the effort would.” She paused and offered a cup of the now brewed tea to Hermione, in the Central Asian style.</p><p>Hermione decided to make choices, and took it. “Do go on.”</p><p>“The issue now is that the Confederation was rather carefully crafted to comply with the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Ukraine, and we’re trying to sort out those details directly with the Ukrainians, because we cannot be in a situation where the Confederation starts to fragment. It must endure. Morally, beyond the end of the war, even. So it’s a very clever formulation to nominally comply with the key elements while still making the Union as tight as possible. But it would be only possible with the War. So here we are.”</p><p>“You know that I’m now on staff duty, I’m going to get a copy of the Treaty and study it, right?” Hermione smiled. “I can’t help myself.”</p><p>“I know. Read, read, read… Easily half of your life, right?”</p><p>“Probably.”</p><p>Larissa paused for a moment. “Bellatrix. You’ve been working closely with her now for months. What the hell happened, Hermione? I’ve asked all of our friends, and nobody is talking. But I was there. I encouraged this despite the fact that she had tortured you, that this was apparent. It resulted in one of the greatest military victories in our history and certainly the greatest in this war, but here is my friend, and you let me talk about politics I believe because you didn’t want to talk about this. Certainly not while drunk. But it has to be said, so maybe now is the time? I don’t think you realise how much of a heroine you are, or how favourably your Staff duties during the advance with the Black Guards north from the Crimean are regarded.”</p><p>Hermione tensely gripped her cup. She desperately needed someone who had <em> not </em> been influenced by the First War, by the first phase of the Second War that had morphed into this utter nightmare. It was a chance, if she was daring enough. “Lara, the connection between myself and Bellatrix dates back to the Second War, when she fought us several times, and I was forced to impersonate her with polyjuice on a critical mission, which required learning about her as much as I could.” Hermione let the words hang, and then finished, softly, her eyes anywhere but Larissa, looking at her tea. “She also captured me and tortured me. Come here. I’m going to show you something I’ve been hiding from everyone for years.”</p><p>“Mione…” Larissa got very quiet and still. She got up, putting her tea aside, and walked to Hermione’s side, and knelt at her side. “Alright.”</p><p>Hermione set her own cup and popped the buttons on her left sleeve cuff and yanked it back. “She marked me, and though I have excelled at every bloody thing I have done since I fled to sanctuary in your homeland, I remain her’s. I am not sure what makes your mind so fucked up that you fall in love with the woman who is over you, whose thighs are on your’s, whose breasts are pushing down on top of you—while she is carving a word of vicious pureblood supremacy into your arm. I wish I knew how I got so fucked up! I’ve become obsessed with her since then. I’ve wanted to know why she did it. Of all the ways she could torture me, what was the damned point of that? And I wondered if it had <em> intentionally </em> made me desire her, except that makes no sense because she could be disowned and dishonoured by sleeping with a <em> Mudblood. </em> What the hell happened? Why was it that? Why was I simultaneously in <em> intense pain </em> and <em> turned on? </em> Some kind of sexual Stockholm Syndrome, just a propensity to kink that I would really wish I don’t actually have? Was I so terrified of what was happening to me that I wanted comfort <em> even if it came from the woman doing it too me? </em> I like the last one the most, but it’s still a sign I’m nuts.” She laughed bitterly, while Larissa leaned in and hugged her around the waist, a noblewoman who didn’t mind resting her knees on the floor for the sake of her friend. Hermione appreciated it, but she was too upset to properly vocalise it.</p><p>“Love is an irrational and unstable passion,” Larissa murmured. “You…” She looked up. “You’ve started a relationship with her, haven’t you?”</p><p>Hermione started crying. “I <em> had </em> a relationship with her. It was the night before she turned the Army in Yalta. It was all so risky and I was certain I was finally going to die. Everything was perfect. It was magical—like a dream. She was so tender in bed, she laughed, she was understanding, she guided me. Made sure I had tea in the morning. Also called me a bunch of slurs, of course. But I wanted to believe the best of her, that it was just habit.”</p><p>“It might be… Even if it wasn’t, the whole point of that bigotry is that people are of two minds, often consciously, about issues like that. The part of her that was tender, probably was sincere,” Larissa murmured. “I’d wager, anyway.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Hermione gripped the armrests of the chair, briefly, and then reached down to hug her friend. “Damn it all, let’s at least sit on your bed for this. I feel guilty.”</p><p>“All right.” Larissa rose, and helped Hermione back to the bed. Though they’d already removed their boots and greatcoats, here they removed the outer jackets of their uniforms as well, for some comfort.</p><p>“So, she broke up with me after we won at Poltava. She said – she had never meant it to be permanent, and I got the feeling she desperately didn’t want her sister to know. But you know, Bella is wild and impulsive, Lara. So we were all working some things out with Narcissa and Andromeda and Tonks all there—and, Merlin, Luna too, but of course she doesn’t care about anything like that—and …”</p><p>“She just blurted it out?”</p><p>“Yes, exactly that,” Hermione answered, and blushed again, even at the memory. “So Tonks convinced me to try and not carry on a relationship with her or pine for her, but – I’m pining for her, and I want a relationship with her. Still, I feel absolutely awful about wanting these things, because I understand intellectually that she is an awful person, Lara. That understanding is just not impacting my attraction to her no matter how much I try to make it do so. I see her with her beauty, her pride, tattered but intact; her bold contempt for danger, and all social convention, and a raw intelligence and level of learning which I do feel is equal to my own, and that is not true of many other women. And the flashes of deep compassion and tenderness for her sisters and her daughter which I have now got to experience directed at me as well. They drive me to keep loving her, those bright flickers of light, right through the middle of the worst shit she thoughtlessly throws at me. ”</p><p>She paused and rubbed at her eyes. “I was going to tell Ginny, but you know, she loves Harry so much, still does, and I worry she’d see this as an absolute betrayal. I don’t want to betray her, so I’d gladly never touch Bellatrix again, except that I can say that with my intellect and it means fuck-all for how I <em> feel. </em> I can’t give her up, and I don’t want to! So, I could at least tell you… ” She trailed off, sniffling and wiping her hands and looking sheepish between the tears.</p><p>Larissa was holding her, and Hermione was intensely thankful for it. “My friend, I can’t tell you what to do about this, except to say that, she is our friend now, she is on our side now. Nonetheless, it will be a <em> very great </em> hardship if you choose to love her. I won’t give you advice on what to choose, but go into whatever you decide with eyes wide open. If you choose to try to love her, she might well reject you because of your birth, no matter how much you throw yourself at her, those weeks may be all you ever get. And if she doesn’t reject you… You could find yourself married to the most hated women on the planet for the rest of your life. I’m not saying you couldn’t find a way to be enormously happy and successful anyway—I am not such a fool as to discount your intelligence and ambition—but it will shape you, and it will be a decision you will make, to stand out into a storm, and never look back. Go into it with your eyes wide open, Hermione, acknowledge all the consequences, whatever you decide. And then damn everyone else and have no regrets—accept the consequences, <em> but have no regrets. </em> ”</p><p>Hermione rubbed her eyes again, looking at her friend. “...And you, Lara?”</p><p>Larissa smiled a droll, devil-may-care smile. “Well, you see, I already promised I’d be at your wedding, so it’s already settled. I’ll be your friend for life, even if I’m the only one, and even if that means tea with Bellatrix Black.”</p><p>Hermione reached out and squeezed her friend’s hand, hard, and started to cry again, but from a different emotion entirely.</p><p>The next day, when she reported to Bellatrix’s headquarters with her eyes dark and puffy from too much alcohol, too much crying, and too little sleep, she was still bright and chipper in the winter morning, drinking too much tea until her hands shook, and thankful for every moment there at General Black’s side.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>-- The King's German Legion was a British military force during the Napoleonic Wars, as was the Chasseurs Britannique and the Royal American. For some in the Janissary Corps they offer an identity outside of the Black Guard for those who might prefer a nod to their national origin, but are not of British origin themselves. </p><p>-- kumis is a mildly alcoholic fermented Mare's milk popular in Central Asia.</p><p>-- kolslep is the indigenous Russian term meaning "muggle", competing with a simple transliteration of muggle from English. It's an abbreviation of a phrase meaning "blind to witchcraft", approximately, in English.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0038"><h2>38. Bellatrix and the Warmaster</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-Eight: Bellatrix and the Warmaster.</p><p> </p><p>As winter carried on with its brutal cold, the meteorological signs of spring slowly began to gather. The world was shaking loose, once more, from the terrible winters that had gripped it, to give them a pale, cool, comfortable summer, in which every ounce of effort would have to be expended to grow sufficient food for yet another winter. So it had gone, with each changing of the seasons, since the terrible attack.</p><p>Daylight temperatures climbed above -20C in Astana for the first time since December, and Hermione cheered the slight improvement. March would turn to April, and spring would come. With the coming of the spring, the preparations intensified. Units were being rotated back onto the front in many cases, whereas units posted there all winter, which had been in action for years before, were pulled back to rest, and be able to be thrown in as strategic-level reserves to a coming offensive.</p><p>Bellatrix and Hermione were preparing to leave with the rest of the staff for Melitopol, the front headquarters of the British Army in Russia (though it was really in the Ukraine), to take control of an area Army frontage almost 400km long which, along the lower River Don, would be exceedingly difficult to allow them to conduct an attack. However, regardless of the difficulties, the 400km of front held by troops under the control of the British Government in Exile was enormous political power for Narcissa, and both Bellatrix and Hermione knew it.</p><p>The headquarters was in the old Architecture Institute, which had been built in 1976 by the head of the institute himself, and so was of particularly solid construction, with enormously thick walls and an appearance suited for a military and civil headquarters--since Narcissa's Government in Exile was also headquartered there. The heat was even keeping pace with the cold adequately now, and Bellatrix was mostly in uniform, the pattern with the skirt and boots, though she was wearing long black gloves under the sleeves of her uniform jacket and had far fewer things buttoned than she should, and had wrapped a black scarf around her neck instead of wearing the regulation tie, and in general the uniform hung open around her in a glorious lack-of-uniformity. Still, even normal General Officers were allowed some eccentricities with their uniforms, sort of a formal Royal review, and it was not yet considered safe for King Charles to make the trip to Astana from Melbourne; even Narcissa had only completed the reverse trip once. So Bella’s indolent and insolent dress was, for the moment, perfectly safe.</p><p>The two were sitting and drinking tea at a long table in the map room, with Hermione trying to get Bellatrix to pay attention to the details of repairs to the railways in their sector of operation, when footsteps sounded at the entryway. Even with all the wards and the guards in place, Hermione whipped around with her hand on her wand. Bellatrix was just as fast, having lost none of her speed at the age of fifty-two. By necessity, and long experience at war, they both lived on a hair trigger, especially since with the room cleared of all but the two of them, it was a perfect time for an attack.</p><p>At the door was a figure in crisp military boots and a uniform of blue and grey, with brass buttons down it. Hair slicked back – hair on the face – long, pointed ears, and yellow, sharply catlike eyes. A sword was buckled at her side, for though the figure was not human, she was definitely female. She wore white gloves on her hands and the rather ostentatious uniform, looking almost Napoleonic, was matched by a confident, predatory expression, and fangs showing as she flashed a grin at the two women.</p><p>“What the …” Bella muttered, raising her wand.</p><p>“If I wanted you dead, General Black, your tea would already be poisoned,” the catlike woman spoke with exaggerated bemusement.</p><p>“Tonks,” Hermione hissed softly, and lowered her wand. She didn’t recognise the voice, but she did recognise the woman, even with this casual predator’s air to her as sharp as Bellatrix’s, or maybe more precisely she understood only a metamorphmagus could pull this off.</p><p>“Tonks,” Bella sneered. “Why are you breaking into my headquarters, exactly?”</p><p>“Nonsense, it’s hardly breaking in. I have my ways, and my authorities,” she answered with a hand on the hilt of her sword as she stepped forward to the maps. Bellatrix hadn’t taken her hand off of her wand, but Tonks ignored it in dignity.</p><p>“Then why the game, Tonks?” Bella snapped.</p><p>“Oh, I don’t know. Possibly, I am trying to cope with the fact that I must get along with the mass murderer who is also my Aunt. So I thought about a little exercise in trying to figure out if there was any woman worse than you. Unfortunately, I came up blank with real women, but an American 90s science-fiction franchise provided an alternative. You will <em> not </em> call me Tonks, you have not earned it. I’ve decided I’m comfortable with Hermione calling me Tonks again, after all that’s happened, but you sure as hell I am not comfortable with.” She spun to face them, her eyes gleaming. “So, for the purpose of this necessary business discussion, I will be more evil than you, General Black. You may address me as… Deathwalker. She was quite well known as a military officer, commander of fleets and winner of countless battles, but also as a master of plagues and planetary bombardments, who used both to exterminate several entire worlds. All for the sake of the survival of her people, and all for naught, since she ended up the last survivor of her race. So she hatched a plot to make everyone else fight each other perpetually for immortality.”</p><p>“For the sake of the survival of her people? I’d do the same thing to save Wizarding-kind,” Bellatrix answered shamelessly. “But I’m <em> not </em> going to address you as a character from a <em> muggle </em> television drama. Nymphadora.”</p><p>With a hiss, Tonks cracked the sword a hair from the scabbard. “Careful, she’s easily angered.”</p><p>“Oh fuck off and act like an adult,” Bella shook her head. “I knew you were a Hufflepuff but I didn’t realise you were some fan of pathetic, stupid muggle television on top of it. What did you come for, <em> Deathwalker?</em>”</p><p>Bella’s concession made Tonks smoothly switch to speaking about the business at hand. “Voldemort has ordered the Carrows to reinforce the big push into Syria. It looks like he’s hunting for the Lake of Anahit, too. Which was what we hoped, when we first conceived this operation all those months ago,” Tonks answered, her catlike form pacing sharply in front of the map table, which showed the strategic picture for all Eurasia. Grabbing a pointing stick, she looked confident and dangerous, as predatory as Bellatrix was, in front of the map.</p><p>Hermione, shaking her head softly—this was more Tonks than Tonks had been in years, which was good, but with a savage tint that worried her even <em> more— </em> stepped over to her friend’s side. “Of course, that will put the Mosul oil fields in his hands, won’t it?” She asked.</p><p>“Yes. Their offensive is trending northeast, toward the old Assyrian heartlands. Going into Kurdish lands, separating Turkey from Arabia,” Tonks nodded. “The oil is important, and I’m sure Thicknesse is concerned about that, maybe even the Carrows are…”</p><p>“Fat chance of that,” Bella smirked. “I appreciate that muggles need oil like wizards need magic, but few of the others do. Still, they’re not absolutely awful; they’ll listen to their Chiefs of Staff and adjust the offensives to take the wells and the refineries in northern Iraq. How are the locals fighting?”</p><p>“President Hussein is in command of the combined forces and is adopting a defensive strategy focused on protecting the Sunni heartland. It’s impossible to get him to reconsider, because ultimately preserving his remaining power base after the nuclear strikes on Baghdad is far more important to his regime than a temporary occupation of Mosul and the Kurdish north,” Tonks frowned sharply, and paced. “We won’t be able to justify taking overall command unless we commit a major army to the Transkavkaz. Even after the change of regime, the Iranians will not assist the Baathists. That’s the plain facts of the matter.”</p><p>“And Turkey collapsed after it was hit so hard with nuclear weapons. Your’s,” Bella smirked.</p><p>“I’m a Russian now? I suppose it’s true, though personally I’d prefer a mass driver bombardment,” the catlike face twisted into a vicious sneer, and turned back down to the table to let Bellatrix stare in confusion and suspicion at the words for a moment.</p><p>“A large gun that throws rocks from orbit,” Hermione whispered to Bella’s ear, feeling somewhat bad for Bella; Tonks was rather defiantly staying in character.</p><p>Bella rolled her eyes.</p><p>“Anyway, we need to find the Lake of Anahit now, because there’s a possibility that Voldemort actually knows where it is, and so, the attack will be conducted in that direction. I think you would have already done enough research…”</p><p>“To know that it might be a completely magically hidden mountain rather than the Ararat that is commonly known as such? Yes, though Ararat remains the best candidate, since the road ran through Tblisi,” Bella agreed, her eyes narrowing. “Chernosvyat was exactly where it was supposed to be. If Voldemort knew the location of the mythohistorical Ararat, however, he never told me.”</p><p>‘Deathwalker’ tapped the map further to the east—Iran, currently under the control of a CIS-aligned military regime in the wake of the collapse of the Islamic Republic during the aftermath of the nuclear attacks. “There is of course some possibility that the Lake of Anahit is really located on Damawand, inside of Iran.”</p><p>“Is that likely?” Hermione glanced between them. “The mythology of Damawand says it’s the binding place of the great three-headed dragon <em> Azi Dahaka, </em> the Lord of Ten Thousand Serpents that will consume the universe at the end of time.”</p><p>“Mm-hmm. Quick-witted, dear,” Bella said with some amusement as she leaned in. “I wouldn’t bet on it, not completely, except for the possibility that if the Water of Life is on a lake at the top of the mountain, perhaps that’s what keeps the serpent bound. The beast of the destruction of the cosmos—held in place by ancient resurrection magic. It has a certain elegance. Of course, Azi Dahaka may be completely made up and a lot of rot. What’s part of magical history and what’s utter tripe and nonsense in these records is sometimes very difficult to tease out. And the Anahit mythos was probably originally Armenian, or rather Urartic, which suggests the actual Ararat known as such today. Assuming, of course, as I noted, there is simply some entire hidden mountain somewhere.”</p><p>“The world is far less charted than anyone realised,” Tonks agreed. “Earth might even have something like a twelve percent larger surface area by the time all magically occluded areas are included in muggle maps.”</p><p>“Merlin forbid that ever happen, the muggles have caused enough damage as it is.” The two women exchanged a sharp glance, but nothing more.</p><p>“Okay, so how do we localise it?”</p><p>“After much effort, the interim Iranian ministry agreed to permit a team to review their surviving archives. We hope to learn more there. We can place helicopters and aircraft at their disposal for rapid redeployment, and let them operate freely in Armenia, Turkey and Iran,” Tonks answered. “Do you have any recommendations?”</p><p>“Larissa and Luna,” Hermione said immediately, nonplussed at her own certainty and willingness to risk her friends, but it really did make sense. “Luna has an uncanny knack for being right far more often than not about strange things. Larissa … I definitely trust her to keep Luna safe, more than I would trust anyone else to do that.”</p><p>“This is related to your agreement with the government of the CIS,” Tonks observed sharply to her aunt. “Do you have any comment?”</p><p>“No, they’re the best to go looking,” Bellatrix agreed. “I do believe that Luna Lovegood is a true seer, as batty a lunatic as she is.”</p><p>“Alright. If we find the lake, we want you there, soon after it. We want you pulled off the line,” Tonks then added, her eyes narrowing to slits at her aunt. “We want to make sure Voldemort knows you’re going.”</p><p>“And why do you want Voldemort to know I’m there? So he can kill me for you,” Bellatrix tossed her hair back, glaring at Tonks.</p><p>“So that we have a chance to bait him into sending more reinforcements and taking personal command of the Army in the region,” Tonks answered flatly, a growl in her voice. “That remains our objective. We want to get Voldemort out of London and we want to get him in a position to discredit himself to those who follow him reluctantly, in particular the Magical Congress of the United States.”</p><p>“It might be the only way to bring his regime down…” Hermione murmured.</p><p>“He can’t be killed,” Bella muttered. “If I knew a way, I’d tell you.”</p><p>“<em>We’re aware,</em>” catperson-Tonks rolled her eyes and began to pace the table in the other direction. “But if he is away from his power base, if his geostrategic influence is eroded, if his followers die on the field or meet the noose, ultimately, it will come down to just Voldemort in a cave somewhere, ranting at the rest of the world. Even if is literally impossible to kill him, we can then manage that situation through anti-terrorist protocols. And while Voldemort can’t be killed, and while he may have an enormously long life, it’s clear from his interest in the Rabdos of Koschei and now the Water of Life, that he would, like Tithonus, in the end be an immortal but helpless and withered husk, unless he finds a way to grant himself eternal youth alongside of his immortality. And it’s quite certain he’d destroy what’s left of human civilisation to achieve that.”</p><p>“If that is the case, and he did not tell even me,” Bellatrix leaned over the table, now, getting a glint in her eye. “He might well feed <em> all </em> of his troops into the theatre, especially the crack collaborationist troops which have mostly been in reserve so far, the units even better than the Janissaries. In theory, anyway. I’ve not seen any proof. It would allow for considerable gains elsewhere. We should test this.”</p><p>“Test this?” Tonks looked up. “Do go on.”</p><p>“Certainly, <em> Deathwalker. </em> He has already committed two Armies, those commanded by the Carrows. We should provide some limited reinforcements to the Iraqi Army—even if it means following their stupid dispositions--to make it look like we are interested in keeping him out of the Mountains of Ararat, while we continue to hunt for the Lake of Anahit. At the same time, we should launch a major attack somewhere in Europe, and see if he even bothers to release strategic reinforcements to defend against it. Something manageable that will give us a real victory.”</p><p>“How does Norway sound?” Hermione offered, moving to that section of the map. “If we took southern and central Norway, we could stand down almost the whole Scandinavian front and reallocate the troops, because the Navy would keep us safe from counterattacks. And it would put our aeroplanes within easy attack range of the British Isles, so we could bring the war home to the main intact muggle war machine under Voldemort’s power. We already have Sweden, Copenhagen, and north-central Norway.”</p><p>“It’s been discussed by Stavka as a viable operation for an offensive this year,” Tonks acknowledged after a moment. “Bellatrix?”</p><p>“Norway is as good as any other,” she acknowledged. “Do you want me to argue this before Stavka?”</p><p>“We will put a presentation together, and my superiors will support you in presenting it.”</p><p>“Very well, then. Now, would you kindly turn into a <em> Black, </em> and have some tea with your Aunt?” Bella’s eyes gleamed in bemusement. Hermione thought it was out of a distinctly sadistic intent to make her niece uncomfortable, though she hoped it wasn’t.</p><p>Tonks met her head-on. “Since when have I been a Black, instead of a monstrous atrocity, some golem with a mix of dirty and pure blood mingling through my veins, auntie dear?”</p><p>“Didn’t Andy teach you any <em> manners</em>?”</p><p>“My mother put me through Pretty Pureblood Princess Boot Camp just like all three of you got,” Tonks answered. “I’ve just never had the <em> opportunity </em> to use it, outside of being under cover as an Auror, because my dad was born to the <em> wrong parents.</em>”</p><p>“Your layabout of a father who forced my sister to spend most of her life in a muggle housing estate—who let you, a <em> witch, </em> watch muggle television shows! He should have been so thankful for his magic that he immediately left the whole damned muggle world behind, he should have been so thankful for my sister deigning to be in his presence that he kissed the ground she walked on! He certainly shouldn’t have let his halfblood daughter watch <em> television</em>!”</p><p>“Well, I guess you solved that right good, huh, auntie? Your Death Eater friends killed him. You did such a good job of fucking everything up and ruining the happiness of your own sister and niece that now your niece went from a silly Hufflepuff to a silovik. Is that what you wanted? A world where everyone is a hardened killer?” Tonks’ face began to melt away and resolve back into her normal form, with shock pink hair. “Do you think this what I really look like?”</p><p>“How would I know?” Bella shrugged dismissively.</p><p>Tonks kept changing, again, until she shifted into another form, shorter, bustier, with curly hair. Dark curly hair. A little bit of Andromeda, a little bit of Bellatrix. With matching eyes, she glared straightaway at the older woman. “<em>This </em> is what I look like. But when I saw how much I looked like <em> you </em> in the pictures my mother kept on her desk all those years of the sisters who <em> abandoned her, </em> I didn’t want to look like <em> you </em> anymore. So I don’t show people what I really look like, because of <em> shame </em> that it’s so similar to Bellatrix Lestrange, Death Eater, Murderer, Prisoner of Azkaban. If you want me to be a Black, auntie, then at least fake trying to make it something <em> worth being. </em> Because I’d rather be a muggle sci-fi character most days, than a member of the family who did what you did to my mother. That produced people like you, who killed my father. And the Longbottoms.”</p><p>“THE LONGBOTTOM BOY WAS WAR! <em> WAR!</em>” Bellatrix screamed, balling her fists and pounding the side of the table. “Damn you, he had a wand, I had a wand, it was open battle, he blocked me from you, I got him, that was it. He volunteered! VOLUNTEERED! He was there as a soldier, to fight! And so were you! I won’t apologise for that in a million years!”</p><p>“Alright, fine. What about his parents?” Tonks asked very patiently.</p><p>Bellatrix froze, her expression caught somewhere between rage and horror.</p><p>Tonks slowly shook her head, and with her face bowed to the floor and her hands behind her back, began to quietly walk out of the room.</p><p>Bellatrix spun to look after her. “Tonks! You don’t know what our parents did to us when your mother left! <em> You don’t know! </em> That was the one time in our lives that father ever used violence against us, do you understand? Do you understand? For failing to keep your mother from running off with a muggle-born!”</p><p>Tonks paused at the door, and turned back. “Are you saying that’s what made you an evil woman?”</p><p>Bellatrix froze. Hermione sucked in her breath and closed her eyes, not really sure what she actually wanted Bellatrix to even say.</p><p>“No,” Bellatrix admitted after a moment, and looked down at her gloved hands, as if she were perhaps afraid of what was beneath them. There was no handy basin to wash them in. “No. I made my own choices.”</p><p>“And they led you to hell,” Tonks replied, “a hell of your own devising.” Then she stepped out.</p><p>Hermione stepped up to Bellatrix and gave her a hug. The older woman started to cry. “If I may be impertinent,” Hermione said softly, “the only way out of the past is the future.”</p><p>“Who the fuck told you that one?” Bella sniffled.</p><p>“Oh, I read it in a book. You know me.”</p><p>Bella softly started to laugh, to laugh through her tears, and for once, it wasn’t a cackle. Hermione held her tight, and wondered at the demons of the two women who had just clashed—Tonks, who wanted to be Dora now, and would only face her aunt as a made-up villainess from a television show; Bellatrix, who maybe, just maybe, had just taken a step toward realising <em> why. </em></p><p> </p><p>-------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Returning to the front with winter’s grip having not slacked in Astana, but the situation having improved elsewhere, Hermione drew her coat closer as she walked, a half step back and to the left, at Bellatrix’s side. Down the open tarmac, away from the warm car, hopefully to the warm aeroplane.</p><p>Since the encounter with Tonks, Bellatrix had been both frenetic in action, and emotionally subdued. She had participated in a dizzying series of planning conferences and meetings, and debated extensively the merits of the Norway operation, and plans for reinforcing allies, or at least co-belligerents, in the Near East.</p><p>But now they boarded one of the enchanted Tu-144s, with its special extra-long jet stairs to deal with the spindly landing gear. They were the very height of the melding of magic and technology which was now possible. The electronics, except for a limited amount of low voltage DC controls wiring, had been removed entirely. This was adequate to provide the usual sensors in the cockpit, but the lights in the interior rippled in pleasing patterns, forming the flags of Russia, Kazakhstan and the CIS as they entered, and then forming into Bellatrix’s personal standard over the briefing table available for her. They were very much magical. And, it was pleasantly warm.</p><p>Hermione looked around in more than a little wonder. The melding of technology with magic would have been forbidden by the Ministry before the war, and now it had come together in this beast, which had once been sitting abandoned at an airport, a failure of engineering. Now, having stripped her down to DC controls voltage for electrical power, but replacing everything else with enchantments; the outer wings and empennage were enchanted to adaptively respond to the controls. In short, the great Tupolev flew of her own volition—she had a fly-by-wire system capable of managing the vagaries of her incomplete design that had grounded her decades ago—one of magic, enchantments that made her respond to commands of her own volition.</p><p>With an interior larger than the Concorde, Bellatrix was clearly impressed. “All right. It’s pathetic. We didn’t do anything like this with the Concorde, but you took the time to actually make these aeroplane <em> magical. </em> I like it.” She looked relieved as she settled down, and nodded to the chair across from her for Hermione. The magical aspect of the aeroplane put her at ease, and she called out to one of the stewardesses, who were in uniform, but assigned for VIP services nonetheless. “Vodka,” she instructed before kicking back and loosening up the tie on her uniform.</p><p><em> Of course she’s going to get hammered. </em> Hermione couldn’t help but sigh a little inside. She was fairly convinced that Bellatrix was a functional alcoholic at the moment, though she generally hid it extremely well.</p><p>Hermione tried not to judge, considering she had a two pack a day habit of her own that would arguably kill her faster.</p><p>“General.” One of the stewardesses put down a plastic cup, put a cinnamon stick in it, and filled it with vodka. Needless to say, it was substantially larger than a shot glass.</p><p>“I’ve been telling Narcissa to just <em> make </em> Andy move in with us in Astana. The house has three bedrooms after all, and Mardy can’t take care of it and Delphi at the same time. Andy is probably overwhelmed with Teddy and all the work she does for the plant, and Narcissa could use an advisor. Of course, she doesn’t want to make Andy do anything even when it’s best for all of us. For all she’s so bossy to <em> me.</em>”</p><p>Hermione was rather shocked, as they taxied to a takeover, that Bellatrix had launched into complaining about a family situation. Usually she was as tight as a clam about family relations and Narcissa shared more with her than Bellatrix did. “...Bella?”</p><p>“That stupid meeting with Tonks being <em> stupid, </em> ” Bellatrix fumed between gulps from her drink. “I’m not sure what Tonks was playing at, but <em> Draco </em> is in Norway, and Narcissa was pulled into the operational planning for it. She’s worried about him, of course, she never wanted him at the front. But she also knows that he is, at this point, more afraid of being called a traitor or a coward than of fighting, so he will remain on the front with his unit at all cost. He’s been decorated twice, nobody will call him a traitor or a coward. I told Narcissa to just ask President Nazarbayev to recall him, so he could serve as her aide-de-camp. But instead, she wants me to come up with something. And sure, it was my idea, but it’s not our operational area of responsibility, so I don’t have any <em> control </em> over what happens in that offensive.”</p><p>“Are you asking your CIS liaison officer to try and come up with a plan to resolve the situation?” Hermione couldn’t help but grin, sweetly. The explanation showed a critical thing had happened over the past months, which brought Bella’s relationship with her into a positive focus: At some point, Bellatrix had just started <em> trusting </em> Hermione, and now, at least in an area that had an intersection between family and Hermione’s core duties like this, Bella had even <em> confided </em> in her.</p><p>Bellatrix stopped for a moment; her eyes narrowed, and then she laughed, tossing her head back. “Why yes, Colonel Granger, I would be.” The absence of malice made Hermione feel almost bubbly.</p><p>The Tu-144 thundered down the runway and took off with a smoothness belying the normal jet experience. Bella, distracted, didn’t bother to keep downing her vodka. Hermione, for her part, was acutely aware that the ‘no smoking’ signs were on; she’d have no such table service.</p><p>“Then I will get to it at once. Would you like to go over the reports from Generals Diaz and Dodson? The most pressing one seems to be the dispute over planning for the combined arms operation against Nikolayaev, the others are just summaries of information we mostly already know.”</p><p>“Oh, I suppose I can bother myself with all of this tripe for a while—better here than later.” A wicked smirk touched the Dark Witch’s face. “I won’t be completely tipsy for another twenty minutes, after all ...”</p><p>Which was true; it was twenty-five minutes before Bella ended up planted on her shoulder, and ultimately with the help of a stewardess they got her back to the cabin, and the private bed in it. Afterwards, Hermione and the stewardess stepped out, and she flashed the woman a good-natured thumb’s up at a job well done—but her mind stayed in the cabin with Bellatrix.</p><p>She was still failing at this stop-loving-Bellatrix thing that she had promised Tonks. Badly.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Deathwalker, from the Season 1 Babylon 5 episode of the same name, of course had the rank and name of Warmaster Jha'dur. If anyone who has attended Hogwarts is a science-fiction nerd, it would be Tonks.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0039"><h2>39. The City of Honey</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Chapter Thirty-Nine: The City of Honey.</p><p>When they arrived in Melitopol, landing at the military airport which their furious assault a few months before had suppressed, and which was now again in their hands, they were greeted by a mass of troops turned out Bellatrix. Though there were the badges and patches and other markings of the British Army and the Black Guards, their camo fatigues were of Russian standard issue; uniforms for the capitol would make the national distinction, but here, to avoid additional production lines, it was a matter of putting badges and a few other distinctive markers on, and issuing them the same uniforms.</p><p>There was a band playing <em>The British Grenadiers, </em>and now, Generals Diaz and Dodson were waiting for her, in British uniforms of Lieutenants General. Bellatrix’s uniform, still worn with a cocky lack of care for uniformity, marked her as a full four-star General. When traitors brought Armies with them in wartime, they could well prosper. For a moment, in addition to King Michael, Hermione’s thoughts flashed to her staff lessons on the Napoleonic Wars, and the anecdotal tale of Marshal Bernadotte. That might in fact be more fitting for Bellatrix, though she had no crown.</p><p>The ice was breaking up in the rivers, from the intense flow of the spring freshet. April, and spring was making her best attempt to return against the power which the nuclear war had lent to winter. Perhaps this year, the black earth of the eastern Ukraine would be richly planted with crops, and fewer people would quietly starve in the cities of the CIS.</p><p>The troops formed up cheered her return. Bellatrix couldn’t help but shake her head in a confident little toss, and throw up her fist in a clenched salute. They saw her return, in uniform, as symbolic of the deeds she had done before, now guaranteed as part of their Army. Hermione, wearing a regular Army uniform instead of a MinKol one, for the sake of concealing her identity, stepped a half-step behind and to her left side—regulation distance—high peaked cap lending her a measure of anonymity.</p><p>There was a Land Rover waiting, and when they reached the end of the review, the two women sat in the back with Diaz and Dodson in front of them. It started off as the troops were dismissed, the temperature hovering around 0C, pleasantly warm in comparison with the long and bitter winter in Astana, where the open steppe let the wind howl down upon them.</p><p>“Generals,” Bellatrix acknowledged. “You’re both acquainted with Colonel Granger.”</p><p>“Of course,” Dodson grinned, and nodded to Diaz, who managed a tight smile.</p><p>Outside, the snow still covered the ground, even if it was melting. Hermione reached out and shook hands with the two men. “It’s going to be a pleasure working with you in person.”</p><p>“You’ve already done an excellent job as the liaison officer, I have no doubts it will continue,” Dodson answered, as the made their way down the short trip into the city and through the streets to the bloc of buildings converted into the Army field headquarters.</p><p>Once they pulled up to the building, there was another honour guard opening doors for them. Hermione had long gotten used to this quirk of military culture, this custom of honouring people which seemed a little ridiculous in other contexts. For Bellatrix, whether it was magical or a person, it was expected, of course, as their caps were doffed as they entered the building.</p><p><em>I’ve fallen in love with an aristocrat, that much is clear, </em>Hermione thought as she watched Bella effortlessly breeze through the door into the warmth of the building’s interior. Maps laid out, radios everywhere, tables with models and charts on them. But also hot tea, and an orderly providing cups for both of them, with condensed milk. Hermione thought she had now experienced every kind of milk on the planet being put into her tea—goat milk, sheep’s milk, cow milk, evaporated milk, condensed milk, dried milk, horse milk, the list went on. Regardless of the type, it was a necessary element of the ritual. The harsh interior lighting of former light commercial spaces reflected off the brew with its brown colour with the milk mixed in—perfect, really. She felt sorry for Diaz, who would have a harder time finding Cafe con Leche, and had to make do with instant coffee; but the trucks carried bails of tea from the railhead in India to the railhead in Uzbekistan across the Hindu Kush, and so everyone still had caffeine.</p><p>Hermione stepped away from the group of more senior officers and looked at the map, noting where the unfinished railway was marked. It was a great project, and very important, but trying to build a line to connect India and the CIS in the middle of this war, after the effects of the nuclear exchanges, was extravagant and desperate. Perhaps soon.</p><p>Then she could hear Bellatrix get upset in the conversation she was having with her immediately subordinate Generals, and Hermione jerked her head up to pay attention. Over the past months, working at her side, she had grown more attuned to the elder witch’s moods.</p><p>“So they want this combined arms operation… A ‘cutting-out expedition’, to seize that damned unfinished Aircraft Carrier?” The eldest Black rolled her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder. And they <em>expect </em>us to do it.”</p><p>“The Morsmordre is trying to reconstitute a fleet on the Black Sea after the defections, to be based at Odessa, or perhaps Constanta. She was considerably advanced in the Nikolayaev yards.”</p><p>“Yes, but it’s just a damned boat,” Bellatrix replied, and put her gloved left hand on her forehead for a moment. “And it’s all pressure from local commanders? I could just as well ask … No. Narcissa won’t see the importance of it. All right then. They’re seeing us an expendable asset, you know. Get as many of us killed as possible—that’s what this stupid little mission is about.”</p><p>Hermione stepped up to Bella’s side at those words, though she felt that little thrill at being so close, and had to suppress it, like usual. “General, it’s relatively easy for witches and wizards to conduct a raid, much easier than holding ground, in fact. And, I have to admit, after a winter of inactivity, it would be good for the men if we could quickly notch a victory to start this campaign season. Set morale right for the actions of the Army this summer.”</p><p>Bellatrix’s lips quirked. “Not feeling the slightest pang of an excess victory, are you Granger? Eager for more? All right, we will go ahead and do it ourselves then.”</p><p>Hermione stiffened. <em>Of course </em>she was going to…</p><p>“If you really want to see the men at a fighting peak, you should understand that they love it best when I share the danger with them… Surely you didn’t expect anything else?” Bella damned near winked. “I’ve gotten <em>bored </em>in Astana.”</p><p>“General, you do now have a responsibility even greater than when you were …” Diaz trailed off and shook his head. “Oh, what the hell. I won’t stop you.”</p><p>Dodson cracked a grin. “About the size of it, there.”</p><p>Hermione sighed. It was quite clear that Bellatrix’s Generals respected her precisely for the fact that she melded such aggressive behaviour with the innate tactical sense to usually make it succeed. They wouldn’t stop her.</p><p>“Give me the briefing on the operation,” Bellatrix instructed behind her, as Hermione looked for the great shipbuilding centre just west of the mouth of the River Dnepr.</p><p>Then she stiffened as Bella stepped up to her side, away from the men. The dark witch’s voice was low, and sharp. “You wanted to lead this yourself, didn’t you, Granger?”</p><p>“I did,” Hermione acknowledged. “I’m perfectly capable of it.”</p><p>“I don’t doubt—not anymore, at least--but I’m not allowing you to risk yourself like that.”</p><p>“...Why not?” The shiver that ran up her at those words reminded her acutely of the times they had made love.</p><p>“Because we’re bonded, and that could just as well work both ways,” Bella answered, and her words made Hermione’s face fall, a bit, until she convinced herself it was just a rationalisation from Bellatrix.</p><p>And perhaps that was just a rationalisation from her. She <em>wanted </em>Bella to care about her enough to insist on fighting alongside of her, for reasons entirely unrelated to the unbreakable vow.</p><p>But for the moment, Hermione had to accept the ambiguity, and feel strangely hopeful, that Bellatrix might care for her at all.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Nikolayaev was the name of the famous shipyard of the Black Sea Fleet, and the city in which it was situated. The Ukrainians called the city Mykolaiv, or Mykolaiv-on-Bug, which was the name of the river on which it was situated. Named in honour of St. Nicholas, patron of seafarers, it was the next significant target due west of their positions in Kherson, though with the Dnepr as a major obstacle there, they had not expected to attack due west; it would require a significant amphibious operation.</p><p>However, the Russian Admiralty clearly wanted their unfinished aircraft carrier back. The Black Sea Fleet had, thanks to the defections, three cruisers and nine frigates, and the former <em>Ukraina </em> had been recommissioned as HMS Galatea to take advantage of the experienced British sailors manning the former Morsmordre fleet who had been induced to fight for Narcissa’s government; the CIS simply lacked enough sailors to crew the big <em>Slava</em> -class cruiser. Or they had intentionally let Narcissa have the <em>Ukraina </em>to keep them available for the carrier.</p><p><em>Quite possibly. You’ve learned to think so cynically. </em>Hermione grinned at herself, tapping her cigarette into an ashtray and drawing another long draft from it. She was in her private office, with a couple of faded lights on the ceiling and one more on the desk for reading. Her tea was hot, her papirosa burning, and she was pouring over maps, using her wand to cast subtle magic to mark distances, highlight positions, while she thought about the naval resources available.</p><p>The Morsmordre forces on the Black Sea now only had a few patrol craft and small frigates, mostly Romanian and Bulgarian ships. They would be badly outgunned. There was, supposedly, a submarine of Project 641, but Bellatrix said it had not been repaired. So once they got underway, they could expect their escape, if they were properly covered by the combined Russo-British fleet.</p><p>Hermione knew that the main risk was scuttling. With the Morsmordre no longer in a position to resume the offensive around the Black Sea—not for a while at least—the obvious response to the raid, when the objective was capture, was to sink the ship. The best thing to do was infiltrate, cut the lines, and cast a charm to put her under power without actually starting the engines. Hermione scribbled notes, and drank her tea.</p><p>
  <em>Perpetuous Radianus, cast on the shafts, while securing the scuttling valves and any charges. She can be steered from belowdecks, in engineering. We just need to see where to go—that will be easy with magic. No power, no electricity to interfere. </em>
</p><p>So she had to get a team of people into the hull of the ship. The massive old <em>Varyag </em>would be heavily defended, and not at all easy to approach. It would be best to apparate into the hull, but there would be nothing to visualise or fix themselves upon to do it. A spell to let them walk through a wall would be best—it could be adapted to let swimmers in SCBA gear pass through the hull, perhaps. Hermione immediately dashed off a note and sent it out for the MinKol library to see if they knew of any such spell which had already been adapted. It would let the infiltration team approach from a submarine and enter the hull from below, without compromising it.</p><p>That would do. She took another long drag on the cigarette. Bellatrix risking herself was part of the problem, but the other part of the problem was that she wanted to prove herself. Bella being there all the time was a hindrance to that, since she was a brilliant, capable witch in her own right. So Hermione would have to prove herself to Bella. In this case, it meant making the plans meticulous, as meticulous as she could make them, so that they could train, drill, and execute them effectively.</p><p>Of course, she had given up pretending that she didn’t want to impress Bellatrix for other reasons as well. Hermione sank back in her chair, and paused in her train of thought for a moment. She really needed the reply from MinKol before finalising the plan, anyway, and that would take at least a day. Bellatrix Black. She wanted to impress Bellatrix Black. She wanted Bellatrix to love her. She wanted to get fucked by Bellatrix. And none of it would go away. “Shit’s all fucked up,” she muttered aloud, to no one in particular. “<em>My </em>shit’s all fucked up,” came an amendment after a moment, whispered from her lips with a hint of despair.</p><p>“Harry…” Hermione sank back in her chair, and took a drag on the cigarette hard enough to suck it down to the stub, and held it until she felt her fingers start to singe. The smoke curled around the dim lamp. “I’m sorry. I know she murdered Sirius. I’m sorry. I mean,” Hermione erupted into babbling at the wall, and she just couldn’t stop, she didn’t want to stop now, she couldn’t stop until she’d exhausted herself, and she knew it, and she didn’t care. There was so much more to do, the dispositions, the coordination plans between the Navy and the Army and the Air Forces, the maps, the briefs, the plots, the order of battle for the operation. None of it mattered in that moment, when she could look at the wall and almost imagine Harry Potter was there looking back.</p><p>“Sirius would probably watch us as a ghost and embarrass you with comments about it or something else awful and make fun of the fact that I slept with her and <em>God </em>I hope you’re together wherever you are because you both deserve it. I guess, you know, even if she does enjoy it, she’s probably going somewhere a lot worse than wherever the two of you are and it doesn’t really matter, does it? One of the American books on nuclear war I read for my staff course said that afterwards, ‘the living will envy the dead’, and I think it’s right, we’re alive and all that rot about nuclear winter and the planet dying didn’t exactly come true, but close enough. It sure seems like the living envy the dead. But I’ve brought this more on myself than anyone else, haven’t I? I shouldn’t be able to blame a single damned person. Bellatrix doesn’t blame anyone for who she is. That’s one of those things that’s so attractive about her, she’s just there and she doesn’t care, she admits it all—fuck, that sounds twisted. What I mean is, she doesn’t try to deny her responsibility or place it on someone else. That’s a certain kind of courage. It probably makes Narcissa’s life a living hell—I bet she’d love for Bella to pretend it was all the Imperious curse or some kind of Stockholm syndrome, but you can’t really sweep Bellatrix Lestrange under the rug. Black. Heh. I guess Bellatrix herself has already swept Bellatrix under the rug. I do feel like it’s a bit of a cutting loose. As long as she was Lestrange, she was Voldemort’s. She was her own when she was ‘Black’. Harry, can you believe that? I mean, I think you’d have the courage to do this too. She’s an ally we need. And it’s amazing to see – to see her start to be friends with Andromeda again. Misses Tonks <em>really needed that. </em>Maybe if anything could redeem her…”</p><p>Hermione bit her lip, and reached for her pack of belomors, and lit up another one. Then she slammed back the last of her tea, and wished desperately for something stronger. <em>You’re going to turn into Bellatrix. </em>She laughed, laughed with a desperate kind of mania, and that <em>was </em>rather Bellatrix. “Yeah, turn into Bellatrix. Like hell. Love her, sure, but I could never be that.” She put the cigarette between her lips and inhaled as hard as she could. “Harry, I’ve got to ask—if I get an answer somehow, I’m much obliged,” she addressed the wall. “If we manage to defeat Voldemort with her help and save the world from him – will you forgive me for loving her? When I get to wherever you are, whether it’s a swift bullet or a sharp spell or something nice and slow like lung cancer – will you count stopping Voldemort and avenging you as good enough? Because I don’t think that I can really better that, but I’m fairly sure you won’t settle for anything less, I’ve got to finish the job, right? I know you’d be happier if it was Ron and I, hah, hah, oh God, that’s such an understatement… But I would have never actually been happy, and you’re my friend, and I really like to think … You’d give me a chance with this one. Somehow. You’d show how you could tolerate Bellatrix, for the sake of victory, for, recognising that she’s doing what’s right. Somehow.”</p><p>She clenched the cigarette in her fingers and closed her eyes as hard as she could for a moment. “I’m sorry. Just rest easy.” Hermione opened her eyes, the wall was just the wall, there was no Harry there, there were no easy answers, there or anywhere else. Bellatrix was alive, Harry wasn’t, that’s the world she was in. <em>I need something stronger than tea. </em> With a sigh of exasperation at herself, <em>aren’t I supposed to be more mature than this shit!? </em>she stalked out to find something.</p><p>For better or worse, General Diaz was there. Hermione stepped up to his side with a casual salute.</p><p>He acknowledged it, making the distinction between a familiarity borne of shared hard work and mutual respect and one that was disrespectful, or insubordinate. “Councillor,” he used her formal rank in MinKol.</p><p>“General.”</p><p>“Working on the plans for the Nikolayaev operation?”</p><p>“Yes. I don’t think whomever came up with this idea actually wanted us to succeed, but we specialise in succeeding anyway, don’t we?”</p><p>Diaz laughed, something of a dark chuckle. “This Army has made a speciality of it, and you are a welcome addition. Of course, I don’t think that you are in fact upset about the Nikolayaev operation, are you?”</p><p>“No. Old dead friends, rather than that. I feel too much like I’ve let them down tonight,” Hermione answered with an honest shrug. “Do you ever feel that way, Sir?”</p><p>He looked at her with dark eyes for a long sharp moment, and then nodded toward his office, without speaking.</p><p>She obligingly followed along, and closed the door behind herself as she slipped in to sit across from the older latin man. He reached down below his desk, and brought up a bottle of … Something, all dark and mahogany in colour, that had been stored in a cooler, filled with snow.</p><p>“What kind?” Hermione asked, rocking back and almost entranced with the bottle for a moment.</p><p>“Patxaran,” he answered. “Something of a speciality from Navarre. General Black ordered a few bottles for me, before our ‘turn’.” He uncorked it, and producing two small glasses, poured it out neat. It breathed, released from its frozen prison, and it looked perfect. “I’m not Navarrese, but some of my comrades were, before this war started.”</p><p>Hermione lifted the glass and knocked it back, to reveal something more or less like Sloe Gin, but a little smoother. Perfect, for the circumstances. “I fought her twice before our encounter in the Caucasus. Once at Hogwarts, once … Before. And in between those times, she tortured me.”</p><p>“I know,” he acknowledged.</p><p>“How much…” Hermione was already flushed from the liquor.</p><p>“<em>Brave little muddy, to volunteer to stand at my side after I carved up her arm,” </em>Diaz repeated drolly. He made no comment about anything else between them, and Hermione let it be.</p><p>Hermione put the glass down. General Diaz refilled it promptly. “And she’s right. That was bravery, a subtler kind than facing bullets. Take it from a man who’s been both a lion and a coward in this life.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t ever call you a coward, though you’ve certainly got competition from me if you are,” the witch shrugged.</p><p>“On the contrary, you fought this beast when you were merely a child, I know that much,” he looked intent, and a bit distant. “Us? The armies in Europe? We were stunned, helpless, our operational decision-making—they got inside of it. They crushed us from the inside out. Watching the things magic could do to a man, it can take away a brave death, and make it into an absurd death. An absurd death! So you don’t die with courage, facing bullets, but transformed into a rabbit and left for wolves to eat. It’s demoralising like you can’t describe, and when it first happens, you feel helpless, you know it’s hopeless. So I collaborated.” He snorted. “Oh yes, I know cowardice. It was only when I saw the war in its fullness—when I saw the enemies we faced, learning so fast to integrate witches and wizards—figuring out a way for a man to kill a witch from behind and not be found out—all of these things we learned, but I learned them on the other side. It was too late to go back. Their power of information, their hold on you, is absolute, then. Now I’ve a general’s rank, I’m lauded – I owe the same woman for my cowardice and my heroism and my pride and my shame.”</p><p>She had nothing to say to that. Hermione could just nod, and down her second glass. General Diaz demurred from pouring a third, but now there was a pleasant warmth to her, and Hermione felt intemperate. “So what do you tell your friends who have died?”</p><p>“I didn’t want to think about them before the past few months. But… Now, I feel like I have very little choice. Still, I have at least regained a shred of dignity. I tell them that we haven’t run out of hope quite yet. After all, in a world of magic, we might yet have a miracle.” He smiled thinly, and it didn’t reach his eyes, but Hermione still felt it a sincere, true statement. Then he continued, “I admit, all you witches and wizards around, it is sometimes daunting to remember the power you have—that power that was so terrifying when it was first unleashed on my world that any opposition to it at all seemed impossible. Still, I appreciate these moments, where I am able to be reminded you’re just a woman.”</p><p>“A young one who started watching death early.”</p><p>“Well, we’re both practical cynics, Colonel. That’s what I think,” he answered. “And certainly, we were both made that way. Embrace it. Being clear-headed about the world is, despite the bad reputation it has, the best way to live. And don’t let others take away from you the simple pleasures of a life lived on the edge of death. It makes experiences more real.”</p><p>For Hermione, it made some very particular experiences more real. “A personal question about your boss?”</p><p>“I said I didn’t want to become a rabbit,” he joked with gallow’s humour.</p><p>“I’ll keep it a secret. What does Bellatrix want out of all of this, General?”</p><p>“I don’t think she knows,” he shrugged in response. “Other than a good life for her daughter, which is doubtless the most human thing about her. Maybe to prove that the Dark Lord and her service to him isn’t something that defines her. That’s a very tall order for a woman who served him so long and so well, of course, but she has started on the course to making herself more well known as his enemy, so who knows. She might succeed, or we’ll all be dead.”</p><p>“Or we’ll all be dead. Thank you, General.” <em>Bella, if you want to prove Voldemort doesn’t define you, does that mean that you want me? A relationship with me might just be the ultimate proof of that. Would a life outside of his influence, his ideology, prove to everyone, even the ghosts in their graves, that this wasn’t wrong? Do I want to encourage you? Stupid question, of course I do. </em></p><p>
  <em>I really believe that Voldemort doesn’t define you. You escaped before you died. That’s all you needed to start to change. The rest is just publicity, after all. </em>
</p><p><em>But will that be enough? </em> She wasn't sure that she was a cynic, not quite yet. There was still Bellatrix.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Melitopol is the City of Honey, from the Greek.<br/>OOB - Order of Battle, a list of units involved in an action.<br/>Varyag--a Soviet "Aircraft Carrying Cruiser", constructed in the Ukraine, abandoned there, and in our timeline, sold to China, and now in commission in the PLAN as "Liaoning".</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0040"><h2>40. The Ancient Land Falls</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Ancient Land Falls</b>
</p><p> </p><p>In the end, General Diaz’s conversation with her had fired Hermione up to actually confront Bellatrix over the matter. The next night, she found herself at the General’s quarters, a firm rap on the door after countersigning past the guards, who were under standing orders to always permit her.</p><p>Bellatrix answered the door in a black nightgown, bleary-eyed with her hair almost as wild a mess as Hermione’s was, just in a different way. “..M…. Her… Colonel Granger, what is it?”</p><p>“General Black, ma’am.” She saluted, informally. “My apologies for the disturbance, but it’s about the Nikolayaev operation.”</p><p>“Did Narcissa manage to cancel it?”</p><p>“No, Ma’am. May I come in?”</p><p>“...I suppose.” Bellatrix stepped back, and opened the door wide for Hermione to step in.</p><p>Hermione stepped in to Bellatrix’s suite and closed the door behind them. “I do not believe you should accompany me on this mission directly.”</p><p>“We already <em>had </em>this discussion, Granger,” Bella’s eyes flashed. “Don’t try to change my mind. We’re bonded by the unbreakable vow, I’m coming. It’s as simple as that.”</p><p>“I said <em>directly, </em>Bella,” Hermione broke her formality. “I want you there. <em>Merlin, </em>I want you there. We need your expertise and power as a witch. But, please, the Russians are providing a cruiser for close action in Nikolayaev, and I would prefer you command the entire operation, as our General, from her decks.”</p><p>Bellatrix paused for a moment like she was going to order Hermione out, but then nodded once. “Go on and explain your position, Granger.”</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The desert was splayed out in front of them. They were standing on the heights of Mount Sinjar, overlooking the deserts to the west of the Plains of Nineveh, on the western edge of what had been the old heartland of the Assyrian Empire. Larissa was looking through a long-range sighting scope, with Luna and Ginny standing nearby, though Luna was ignoring the battle, and in a rather animated conversation with Prince Tahseen Said, the leader of the Yezidi. A large number of these people, worshipping in their ancient, obscure religion, had fled the advance of Voldemort’s armies and were now positioned on the top of Mount Sinjar; Larissa had spent the morning trying to arrange for the provision of supplies.</p><p>Her official contact here was Colonel Saleh ibn Tariq, who stood around looking uncomfortable in his Iraqi Army uniform. However, Prince Tahseen was arguably more important. To their south was a position of the Iraqi Army, trying to resist the advance of a division of Morsmordre troops using French LeClerc tanks. Since the Iraqis were only equipped with T-55s and T-62s—the CIS could spare nothing else for its allies, despite President Hussein’s efforts to receive modern equipment—they were in the process of losing.</p><p>For kilometre after kilometre to the south, Larissa could make out the swirling of the smoke, the rippling of guns and MLRS’ firing rockets, the burning of vehicles destroyed by the advance. And mixed in with them too was magic. The Arabic families, and many of them held customs long predating the Arabs—here, most of the Wizards saw themselves as Assyrians and others might speak Aramaic in their families—were fighting back. Of course they were. But they were not united, they had certainly never been under the firm control of Saddam Hussein’s government.</p><p>Larissa and her fellow MinKol witches had arrived by helicopter, but she was not sure they were going to leave that way. The Mi-24 Galinas were firmly on the ground for the moment, with desert sand coloured netting over them, because a squadron of Eurofighters was operating over the battlefield, having handily cleared the inadequate force of Mig-23s trying to cover this position. She could spot a few of the positions of burning wrecks of aeroplanes deeper into the desert.</p><p>The Russian Witch-Princess looked at her wrist chrono and then shrugged. <em>The Morsmordre will keep advancing, and the President’s Armies will keep losing. He is trying his best, but neither he nor his men are that good, and his generals mostly are awful. </em>They were brave, though. During the air attacks the night before, the infantry officers had stood outside of their slit trenches, rigidly at attention, while Voldemort’s air forces bombed them. They had felt it was the only way to keep morale up among their men and keep them from breaking and running, and it had worked, but the casualties among the officers had been murderous.</p><p>She turned back to Colonel ibn Tariq. “Colonel, if you’d forgive me; you said that a leader of the Syrian witches who are retreating to the north into the Kurdish regions would be coming to meet me at fourteen hundred hours. It’s fourteen forty-five. Do you have an update?”</p><p>The Colonel technically ranked her, but she was a Russian officer of MinKol, and the Iraqis needed Russia’s help at the moment too badly to be impolite to a Russian on an important mission. As a practical matter, Larissa felt she was worth most of their Generals.</p><p>“Any minute, Councillor, I am certain of it. You know that war is an uncertain matter, and the Syrian forces are almost completely destroyed,” he answered, and wiped the sweat from his brow. “We should go …”</p><p>“I need to <em>see. </em>I am <em>not </em>going inside. I wouldn’t even know if a smart-bomb was descending on one of these mud huts, at least out here I can cast <em>Protego </em>with a clear view of the air,” Larissa seethed. “We have plenty of water, and it’s only thirty-five centigrade, I thought you were the native.” In fact, she was growing more consternated the more that the enemy closed with them. Their foes had plenty of APCs and IFVs behind them, and that meant plenty of infantry to assault Sinjar. This had been purely a research expedition for Luna, and an attempt, as they had discussed with Nymphadora Tonks, to mobilise increased resistance by the Iraqis to help draw Voldemort into the theatre personally. But now Larissa’s fingers were itching for her wand, and she expected to be laying down fires on advancing infantry trying to storm the mountain if they were trapped here another few hours.</p><p>“They’re grinding up the Iraqis,” a woman’s voice said with contempt out of the clear air, and Larissa spun around.</p><p>Larissa was confronted with a woman who had a thin and lean face, and hair dark and thick as pitch that was tied back with a red fillet, her arms strongly tanned. From her robes she was a witch. <em>I expect that’s my contact. </em>“Are you Zoë of Palmyra?”</p><p>“I am, Lady Larissa Sergeivna.”</p><p>Larissa couldn’t help but smile at the polite correctness. “Unfortunately…”</p><p>“Yes, the Syrian Arab Army was also cut through, but we wizards certainly put up a harder fight, and I think the muggle troops did as well,” the other woman shrugged. If anything, she was only Larissa’s age. “Well, we’re retreating with a few divisions and some thousands of wizards at least, so we’ll stay in the fight.”</p><p>“The Dark Lord keeps hitting us, but he can’t deliver a knockout blow,” Larissa acknowledged with a tight grin. “You will liberate your homeland.”</p><p>“Or die trying,” the Palmyran smiled with her teeth showing, and on her lean face it was rather skull-like. They both turned back to the battlefield. The roaring whoosh of the rockets in the distance, the rumble of guns and tanks in action—the smoke obscuring the details. Both had the magic to focus and watch men die, but neither felt the inclination. They had seen enough death in their lives.</p><p>Overhead, in the skies, the patrols of the Eurofighters erupted into a savage battle, as a force of Su-27s intervened to engage and draw them off; Su-22s, ground attack birds, moved in to take advantage of the momentary opening over the battlefield.</p><p>Closer in, men, tiny dots against the desert, could be seen rising and charging by section, firing their rifles from their hip in suppressive fire. Mortar bursts were like specks of dust in the sky, in comparison to the heavy weight of the artillery, and the entire areas obscured as flash of orange light after orange light marked the explosion of rockets over a target.</p><p>Larissa turned away with the disinterest of an inured veteran, and Zoë spoke again.</p><p>“So, Larissa Sergeivna, why did you come?”</p><p>“We are trying to make this front into the focus of our efforts, because we think it offers the best chance to defeat the enemy. So I’m here to survey the situation, and help coordinate efforts to improve the resistance of local forces. And, certainly, making contacts with the remnants of the Syrian Ministry and supporting both you and your muggle forces is part of that.”</p><p>“You could have just as well stayed back in Mosul for that, surely you came to Sinjar for a reason. It’s a place of old magic, and the Yezidi are closer attuned to it than the Statute should allow for.”</p><p>“Hmm. I won’t deny that,” Larissa answered modestly. “Did any Yezidi from Syria flee with you, M’lady?” In fact, the Palmyran woman was as pure-blood as Larissa was, or moreso; her family was immensely ancient, and as far as Larissa knew, may have been practising magic in the city in its glory days, instead of when it was just a ruin.</p><p>“Yes, a fair number,” Zoë acknowledged. “We have Kurdish troops as well, militias, in addition to the regulars.”</p><p>“Alright. I won’t ask you to go into combat, but do you think you can help evacuate more civilians from Sinjar? Many fled here from the south, but there’s not enough water.”</p><p>“Will you tell me what you’re really here for?”</p><p>“It’s a matter of Confederal Security to the CIS,” Larissa shrugged. “I am too junior; my hands are tied with state secrets like this. Still, it’s important to allow this population to escape.”</p><p>What Luna had already found out had been interesting enough.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>In the end, Hermione had laid out the reasons why having her along for the core part of the mission was an excessive risk. The young British witch, doing everything in her power to keep her frizzy hair regulation, had explained, in detail, why they needed a central command, and needed Bellatrix at it.</p><p>They had compromised. There was a part of Bellatrix admired that burning intensity, always had. <em>Of course you admired her. You fucked her. You don’t do that to people you don’t admire, in some way. </em>Now they were executing the mission; below, somewhere, Hermione was with the key infiltration team.</p><p>Bellatrix was on the cruiser <em>Mikhail Kutuzov. </em>In the evacuation of Novorossiysk when the Morsmordre had approached the city, the Russian Navy had even hauled away the museum ship, to Poti in Georgia. Now she was back in service, for even museum ships were needed again to fight, and her 12 x 15.2cm guns, obsolete for the kind of warfare envisioned in the 90s, were more relevant as electronics were obscured by magic, and especially, well-manned by witches and wizards on the upper decks, for a ‘cutting-out expedition’ like this one. And unlike the more modern ships, the Russian Navy was willing to risk the cruiser to provide close support to the operation.</p><p>HMS <em>Galatea </em>was standing further out, since Narcissa could order her to be brought in to support the operation. As a former Soviet warship, her batteries of S-300F missiles were covering the operation from air attack—along with a squadron of Tornado ADVs which had defected along with the rest of her forces.</p><p>The lean, young officer in command of the <em>Kutuzov </em>had left her to the flagbridge, and returned to his station. Starved at Sevastopol, now he took a fifty year old warship into action. The bravery of muggles was something that Bellatrix could no longer doubt.</p><p>The bravery of the mudblood was something that drove her wild. They had pulled down a fog, and several dozen wizards were working to obscure the position of the cruiser as she moved slowly up into the estuary of the Southern Bug. The mudblood, of course, had put herself into a tiny steel tube under the water, and would be at the very point of the operation, without such protections.</p><p><em>Say my name,</em> she could remember the young woman saying, so fiercely, to her face.</p><p>The words echoed in Bellatrix’s head.</p><p><em>Say her name, Bella, </em>she commanded herself.</p><p>
  <em>Hermione Granger. </em>
</p><p>“Hermione Granger…” Bellatrix murmured, grabbing the bridge rail and peering out into the fog that served also to magically hide them from view. They had time, a little, unless they were found out, and peering into the fog like it would change anything wasn’t going to help there. She turned away for a moment. It was obvious that Hermione was in love with her; her arguments had been logical and reasonable, but they were driven by Hermione’s desire to keep Bellatrix safe, and Hermione’s desire to prove herself to Bellatrix.</p><p>That was it. Of course, none of that mattered to Bellatrix—she could just as well laugh off a young girl’s attempts at impossible love, surely—except that her little sister, the <em>good </em> little sister, the one with the <em>happy </em>respectable pureblood marriage… Had gone and told her to marry Hermione. Had apologised for being so mercenary afterwards, but Bellatrix was struck with the distinct impression that while mercenary, retracted, apologised for, Narcissa had been perfectly sincere about it. She had certainly confessed to repairing her relationship with Andy.</p><p>Bella was repairing her relationship with Andy. Somehow, that she had married a mudblood man no longer mattered all that much to them. If Andy had one, why couldn’t she?</p><p>In fact, Narcissa’s words had been a nightmare like that, because they had broken down every certainty in her life. Her status as a scion of the House of Black no longer depended on her purity, it seemed.</p><p>Bellatrix turned back around. Nothing depended on her purity, but her family had still seized virtually all the power available to it. It was a tenuous grasp, but <em>cream rises to the top, </em>she couldn’t help but feel with pride. Now if they could get Andy to accept a position in the government-in-exile, the three Sisters Black would truly be together again, in every respect.</p><p>And thanks to the unbreakable vow, Hermione would always be close, no matter what else happened. She could not avoid it.</p><p>The hand on her chrono reached the appointed hour. If all was well, Hermione would already be aboard the <em>Varyag. </em></p><p>If.</p><p>Sirens were sounding across the city. Rockets were descending, long-range models fired from across the Dnepr into Nikolayaev. The explosions began to ripple through the city like distant pops as the contribution of Russian artillery began to play—the BM-30 Smerch had plenty of range to engage the city from CIS territory. The helicopter desant was beginning on the outskirts of the city, as a diversion; the scream of the machines could be heard from the distance.</p><p>The fog was clearing. Her position carefully plotted, the cruiser’s turrets swung around. An eruption of fire and smoke cleared the guns and concussed Bellatrix’s ears, though the smallest flick of her wand and a single murmured word had handily protected her from the concussion blast. The guns billowed, roared, the hull of the old cruiser shivered under her. Figures and vehicles on the shore vanished into flame from the point-blank blasts of the 15.2cm guns, as if someone had pointed a battalion of field artillery at an enemy only a few hundred metres away. She could feel the concussive shock of the shells detonating along the shoreline, while above her, the cruiser’s bold standards—the St. Andrew’s Cross hoisted from every yardarm—snapped in a breeze wrought of cordite and thunder.</p><p>In the cruiser’s turrets, men leapt to service the guns, they were expected to load them and ready them and fire them again in eight seconds. Fresh, not physically exhausted, the beginning of battle—they would do it.</p><p>But to the skilled Dark Witch, it was all bad foreplay, as much as she had learned to pay attention to it professionally, real fighting to her would always be with magic. Of course, to the figures on the shore who had vanished into the smoke and flame of twelve 15.2cm rounds, it had been perfectly real fighting.</p><p>But so was what came next. Bella raised her wand and turned it to shore, as the hulk of the unfinished aircraft carrier loomed up from a bend in the river, laying at the fitting-out pier. <em>Granger… Don’t do something stupid. </em></p><p>Then she traced spells through the air that split and sundered the metal and arced through electrical circuits, disabling everything powered in tanks, in an immediate follow-up—and then a series of concussive variations on <em>Bombarda </em>to drop men near the hull to their knees. Cycling through her attacks, making it colourful and sharp, Bellatrix was letting her former comrades know that she was there.</p><p>If they came to attack her directly on the <em>Kutuzov, </em>she would have them exactly where she wanted them – away from the <em>Varyag. </em></p><p>The wicked grin of anticipation obscured the question of whether or not that was for Hermione’s safety, or her own chance to get to grips with the enemy personally, despite the younger witch’s best efforts.</p><p>The guns thundered again, hammering the shoreline at point-blank. With the big guns, they were joined in now by the cruiser’s secondary guns, a line of three twin turrets down each side—only the starboard fired--bearing 10cm guns, and with them, even the automatic 30mm cannon, the AK-230s, could range on the enemy, and so the thunder of large, medium and small guns at varying rates all mixed together in a bloody cacophony as her starboard flank erupted with gunfire directed against the shore.</p><p>It was certainly enough to get their attention, even in the midst of the general assault on Nikolayaev. Suddenly, a group of wizards appeared, apparating to the top of one of the shipyard cranes to get a view of the evolution of the fight. “Brave—idiots!” Bellatrix cackled, and turned her wand toward them. The muggle foreplay was over; now the <em>real </em>battle had begun, and the more wizards eager to prove themselves to Voldemort who she dragged in, the safer Hermione would be.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>A group of MinKol wizards working with the Naval Infantry had been prepared for the operation. There were six of them, in addition to Hermione, and twelve men from the MC, the <em>Morskoy spetsnaz. </em>They had similar duties and training to Craig Tonks from the British SBS, who Hermione remembered from those desperate days fleeing Voldemort in western Europe, and hoped was well, somewhere.</p><p>They were crammed into a tiny steel tube, creeping its way up a river estuary. Since her compatriots were a force attached to the GRU, she didn’t know more than their first names; they had given them to her with a steady confidence which matched the flashed grins now, as the Captain of the Submarine had her reduce power until she was no longer moving against the current—though that meant her impeller was still running right aft, a danger to the divers. It would have to be cut out only at the last moment. A radiation detector was buzzing with a dull monotony, reminding them that the irradiated bones of the dead cities up-river were flushing down the Southern Bug, and flowing past the hull of the submarine. Flowing past their bodies, in a few minutes. <em>So be it.</em></p><p>They had to position themselves ahead of the <em>Varyag </em>in the current. The B-871 <em>Alrosa, </em>with her pump-jet propulsion,was handy enough for the job, though no safer to the men. They went forward to the airlock, the difference between the wizards and Hermione, and the MC men, blatant: The former didn’t have wetsuits and SCBA gear, the latter did.</p><p>So they ended up all crammed into one of the escape trunks, which was the only position big enough for them. Hermione flashed a victory sign to the man she only knew as Vadim, the leader of the wizards attached to the group. Then they cast their bubble-head charms, the one he had quickly taught her more extensive, coating her entire body in a thin layer of air, which would help her move quickly underwater.</p><p>“I’ll never get used to that,” one of the MC men muttered before he finished fitting his rebreather, looking at his MinKol comrades. And then the water filled into the escape trunk, and indeed, almost half their number not having suits or even rebreathers would have been tantamount to death. Instead, Hermione breathed easily, as she had underwater before. That experience left her well-prepared to not panic, which was the real risk for her, until the pressure equalised and the outer hatch opened.</p><p>And then all seventeen of them, in carefully planned order, swam out of the escape trunk, and into the murky estuary of the Southern Bug. Vadim cast the spell—which sent arcs of glowing, soft blue light, like photoluminescence, spreading through the waters—until they vanished against the grim grey hull, about fifty meters down and right. Hermione kicked off and swam hard for it.</p><p>The hull plating had sagged from sitting so long. Hermione could make out the convenient patterns that she had been hoping for, that would make this easier, and she breathed a sigh of relief into her bubble. The sagging was characteristically called ‘hungry horse’ in the old Royal Navy, and it came from the thin, flexible hull plating designed to make a ship bend but not buckle under the powerful pressure waves of a nearby detonation of a tactical nuclear weapon—a characteristic of warships built during the Cold War.</p><p>With the frames revealed around it, Hermione grabbed onto the hull, the gloves on her hands cut and sharply scoured by the barnacles clinging to the hull, but mostly protecting her from cuts to her skin. She traced the position of one of the hull plates with her wand and then cast her spell. The plate seemed to shimmer just a bit—and Hermione slipped her hand through, to feel dryness beyond. The ‘hungry horse’ had been important because it let her precisely mark the plates, rather than casting the spell on part of the frame itself. She braced on the steel solid frame, and eased herself into a darkness as complete as the grave.</p><p>Once, as a bookworm child of nine or ten, she had read an awful tale of a riveter and his boy assistant who had been trapped in the hull of the SS <em>Great Eastern </em>while she was under construction, and suffocated there. Their skeletons had only been found decades later when the ship was scrapped. Hermione had never had the chance to look up whether or not the story was true, but now she was in the ‘tank bottoms’ of a ship herself, shoved into a half-metre space between the outer and inner hulls of the ‘double bottom’, her face pressed to rusty metal which had not seen the light of day in more than a decade.</p><p>If the magic failed in that moment, she would be found whenever this ship was dragged from the mud to be scrapped.</p><p>But magic didn’t fail. This nightmare world was no idle dream. It was her’s, and she was the Brightest Witch of Her Age. Hermione traced the next of the plates, and cast the spell again, with an awkward jerk of her wrist in the confined space. Then she pressed through the inner bottom, and into the bilge, stinking of chemicals and fuel oil. Behind her, the rest of the team, using hammer-like claws on the hull to hold position while she had done the work, followed her up and under. Next, the steel of the bilge.</p><p>Covered in rubbed-off rust and fuel oil, Hermione dragged herself up into one of the carrier’s bomb magazines. <em>Damn it. </em>They were too far forward. The group looked between each other, and refusing to make noise, used hand-signals instead, and then started climbing up one of the escape trunks. They would have to get over the watertight bulkheads, and then make their way aft. Through the silent, almost finished ship, they climbed and climbed, past the bulkheads, past the emergency doors. They were two decks below the hangar deck before they found a way through—the ship was unfinished. They cast magic so they could see through the darkness, and moved swiftly, now; they would be behind.</p><p>They were over the number two machinery room—above damage control central and the engineering control station—when they could hear the gunfire through the hull.</p><p><em>No time. </em>She nodded to Vadim; he swung around, braced his boots on the rails of the ladder down the escape hatch, and slid down it. The men began to follow, until halfway through, with her wand in her teeth, Hermione swung over the ladder in the escape hatch, braced her feet on the rails, and slid down, what seemed like twenty metres or more in the darkness, with no idea of what was below.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. B-871 is, in NATO recognition codes, a Kilo-class submarine (SSK).<br/>2. Morskoy Spetsnaz (MC), while attached to the Naval Infantry, is classed as part of the GRU.<br/>3. SBS stands for Special Boat Service<br/>4. The Mikhail Kutuzov is a real ex-Soviet Sverdlov-class cruiser preserved as a museum ship at Novorossiysk.<br/>5. Tornado ADV -- air defence version of the Panavia Tornado.<br/>6. The Su-22 is an export variant of the Su-17, an older Soviet ground attack aircraft.<br/>7. I borrow Zoë of Palmyra from Thomas Harlan's Oath of Empire, though they are only the same in appearance and character.<br/>8. The anecdote about the Iraqi officers standing outside of their trenches all night to encourage their men under aerial bombardment is real--it happened against the USAF in 2003. The Iraqi officers were very brave, but were forced to pit such acts of courage against smart weapons only for the want of anything better to fight with.<br/>9. The Yezidi and their Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq were unfortunately made more well-known in their ancient, gnostic religion that predates Islam, on account of the genocidal actions of Daesh in Syria and Iraq, which exceed in horror and evil anything the Morsmordre has planned for them.<br/>10. SCBA is the technical acronym normally popularly rendered as "scuba".</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0041"><h2>41. The Measure of Compassion</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>
  <b> The Measure of Compassion </b>
</p><p> </p><p>Hermione hit the deck in the No.2 Machinery Room to a burst of rounds that tore for her, just to be stopped by a quick <em>Protego </em>from Vadim, which sent bullets ricocheting off of machinery. With luck, nothing would be damaged, but it was hardly important at the moment. She spun around to confront the guards.</p><p>From the moment that the <em>Mikhail Kutuzov </em> had made her way up-river, it was obvious to the forces of the Morsmordre what the operation’s objective was, and behind the men shooting, she could see others working to smash valves and throw others open, then bash off their handles. Water was certainly already flooding into the tank bottoms, and Hermione grimaced because she wouldn’t know how much, except that the MC team had gone over the plans of the ship with several Damage Control Officers from the <em>Varyag</em> ’s sister, the operational carrier <em>Kuznetsov. </em></p><p>Hermione had more important things to do as she used a series of disarming charms to strip weapons from the men—but in close quarters, several of them came at her with drawn daggers, and the snapping of her wand, the crackle of magic in the air, a sharp eye in the darkness aided by charms to let her see as clearly as if she had NVG goggles—barely stopped a dagger from reaching her heart, as she stunned them one after another. The fighting between a dozen or so soldiers on each side briefly filled the space with a cacophony of sound echoing off of steel.</p><p>Each ring of a spell or bullet, though, represented a life in mortal peril. It did not last long. The men on the ship were not elite spetsnaz or wizards, they had only one spell-slinger with them, and he was quickly taken down. Hermione for her part tried to leave them disabled and then secure them, as she would have long ago in Dumbledore’s Army—without a wizard to fight, the risk of doing so to muggles was small.</p><p>The sounds faded away, it was already over, they had cut through like a knife through butter. A few immobilised men surrounded in conjured ropes remained to be taken prisoner, to be sent to the prison camps in Siberia, the rest lay scattered, dead. One of their own team was groaning from a bullet wound, the medic was already handling him.</p><p>Hermione dashed forward with Vadim, and she began to work spells to repair and mend the damaged pipes and valves at the damage control station, magic to put them back as they should be, and then secure the valves each in turn. She turned into them until her hands felt like they would break, fighting the pressure of water flowing through the pipes.</p><p>Ahead of them, revealed by some of the MinKol wizards casting lighting charms, was the engineering control point. Here, there was a ship’s wheel and a compass repeater, as well as an intercom which was meant to allow someone in a position with visibility to order the small crew here with rudder orders. Someone had to be topside to allow the ship to be steered from this position, but they had to send a team topside to secure the lines anyway.</p><p>First, they had another task, and it was the scariest. They went further aft, manually lifting several of the watertight doors to work their way to the shaft tunnels, and then un-dogging maintenance hatches. “This must be monitored <em> constantly, </em>” Hermione repeated, firmly. “Remember that we can cast a spell to make the shafts rotate perpetually, but we can’t reach each and every bearing to test them and enchant them—if the shaft flexes, fails and rips the hull apart, then we will fail in a heartbeat.”</p><p>“Understood, Councillor.” he shrugged. “One way or another, we deny the ship to the Morsmordre.”</p><p>“Well, there is that.” Hermione took a breath, and cast <em>Perpetuous Radianu</em><em>s </em>on the outer starboard shaft. With the bow anchored upstream, that created a force, as the massive metal began to turn, slowly at first and then faster, in front of her, comfortingly packed in grease—a force which strained the bow away from the dock, and eliminated the slack in the lines. It would now be obvious to anyone on shore that, somehow, the <em>Varyag </em>was ‘underweigh’, even if she wasn’t moving yet, she had water passing her screws, she could steer.</p><p>Hermione waited thirty seconds through the whining coming up from the open maintenance hatch, and then nodded tautly. “Outside port shaft once we’ve come about to face downstream. You’ll get the order.”</p><p>“Good luck, Councillor!”</p><p>“To all of us!” Hermione laughed darkly, and gathered up a team of two wizards and four men—they started climbing back up the ladders as fast as they could. Now they needed to get the lines. She could hear the roar of gunfire, the <em>Mikhail Kutuzov </em>with Bellatrix aboard, hammering the shore. She could hear the Smerch rockets slamming down all across the old Nikolayaev yards, already hammered by a nuke several years ago, they’d never build a <em>new </em>ship again, they could barely be made to finish the <em>Ukraina </em>and the <em>Varyag. </em>The rockets caused no real extra damage, they just bounced the rubble around, but they were desperately needed to keep the heads of the defenders now.</p><p>And so they climbed, out above the waterline, and higher and higher into the renewed sounds of heavy fighting, away from the belowdecks spaces where they had been insulated from the battle above. Up through the empty flight deck, still half rusted and abandoned. Up into the higher radiation levels of the outside air. Pausing at air operations, Hermione could see the inclinometer read a three degree starboard list. If the list didn’t increase by the time that she returned with her team from securing the lines, she could be confident they had stopped the ingress of water. Otherwise, they’d have issues.</p><p>She dashed forward with her team. They needed to sever the lines forward first, so the single screw now magically turning would shove the bow out into the current. They had almost gotten themselves in position, in the murk and dim of the unlit hangar deck forward, to pass out to one of the line handling platforms on the massive carrier… When a ward left a twitching feeling inside of her, and she tensed and readied her wand, stepping out.</p><p>A team was already there, waiting for them. They’d just apparated in.</p><p>At the head was Pansy Parkinson.</p><p>“Well, well, well, if it isn’t ole’ mudblood teacher’s pet Hermione Granger herself… I’d recognise your deranged mop of hair no matter how short you cut it,” the Slytherin pureblood sneered at the head of her black-robed band of Morsmordre fighting wizards. “I assume you think you’re so smart to get so far, when you’ve just been riding on the coattails of the Russian purebloods and now the Great Traitor, of all people, oh well, I…” She frowned. “Not much for talking, mudblood? Keep your wand away, or the fight..”</p><p>Five years ago, in another world, in another life, Hermione might have been impacted by the words, might have given a shit about talking before a fight. Instead, there was just one obvious thing to say to Pansy. “Whore,” she cursed, made a quick hand signal to warn her men, and then snapped her wand out in a motion which skittered the pulse of blue energy away from Pansy—she reacted anyway, her face crossed with surprise, that Hermione had become another casual fighter.</p><p>Pansy’s <em> Protego </em>was meant to defend herself. It did nothing to defend the bow mooring line which snapped neatly in two. With the starboard outer shaft straining on the line, it was under enormous tension; when it snapped, the end whipped back.</p><p>Pansy’s expression of sneering confidence as Hermione obviously missed melted away when a massive 20cm mooring cable straining under enormous forces whiplashed back into one of the other wizards in her group—and the man vanished into a spray of blood and smashed bone, snapped straight in two in one of the goriest deaths even all the veterans there had seen. The bow of the <em> Varyag </em>abruptly yawed hard out into the current. The jolt sent a witch in Pansy’s team toppling over the rail and tumbling down into the churning waters alongside the ship, while the ship’s stern ground into the dock, dragging across wooden rub-rails and crushing old tyres.</p><p>“Aft lines, <em>NOW!</em>” Hermione shouted, and spun back around, turning her back to the burning shipyard, rippled with the explosions of shells, and making a flat run through the cavernous darkness of the ship’s hangar. They were not here to fight Pansy Parkinson. They were here to steal the ship. A hideous screeching, tearing and squealing came from aft as she dragged along the dock, her bow continuing to turn further out into the current as the aft lines held, designed to keep her fixed to dock through the worst storm, and now being stretched toward their yield limit as the starboardmost shaft continued to bite water under the unending power of the <em>Perpetuous Radianu</em><em>s.</em></p><p>The deck thrummed beneath Hermione’s feet as she ran. She could only imagine the strain in the bearings, the shaft glands, hoped the screws weren’t damaged by years of sitting in the muddy Southern Bug.</p><p>Then the sickly green glow of the killing curse shot past her and spun around as it blasted through a chunk of the protective armour around the uptakes. “<em>GET THAT LINE FREE!” </em> Hermione screamed to her compatriots and then began to blast <em> Impedimenta </em> downrange at Pansy and the remainder of her team, seeking not to win, but to actively delay them long enough to let the men get the job done. She quickly was mixing in <em> Protego </em>and physically diving as a mix of attack spells and several attempts at the killing curse—always a risky strategy in battle from the energy and focus it required, but she had them angry after that dramatic death of one of their number—drove her back.</p><p>Now it was one on six, fighting across the old carrier’s hangar deck. Pansy and her group were behind from the start, Hermione’s severing of the bow line and the terrible consequences had guaranteed it. It had left Hermione confident enough to do this—even if it meant an incredible risk to herself. <em> Sorry, Bella. </em></p><p>They pressed hard against her and slowly the number of attacks she could make grew less and less, and instead she was purely shielding and dodging, running from place to place but trying to keep them from getting past her toward the starboard aft quarter. Then a <em> sectumsempra </em>tore through her left side, and Hermione’s eyes went wide and glassy as pain and the abrupt loss of blood staggered her. A second attack opened her right arm down to the muscle, leaving it sectioned and open to the air.</p><p>Pansy approached, but she was nearly alone; Hermione had disabled or impedimented most of her men. And instead of heading right aft to secure the lines, she was fixated on Hermione instead. Making it personal, instead of mission-focused.</p><p><em> Good. </em> “Bitch. Whore,” Hermione mocked her, to lure her in, to make sure she wouldn’t go aft. Unlike Hermione, Pansy had either not spent long at the front, or she had been forcing muggles to attack unto their deaths and only rarely in direct combat herself. “Worst of all, <em> slave. </em>All of you. Bella’s taught me that, by the way. ‘we are all his slaves unto the hour of our death’.”</p><p>Pansy tested her with a quick attack, but Hermione flipped her wand to her off-hand and blocked it. “Not quite over, bitch.” The ship shuddered under them, and now began to come about in the channel. “Also, I win,” the Gryffindor laughed through her now-pale lips. “We’re underweigh in the channel.”</p><p>The Slytherin woman started laughing. “You idiot. Even if it isn’t over, so what? You’ll just go back to the traitor you’re whoring yourself to.”</p><p>This time, Pansy got to her. Hermione’s eyes widened through the pain.</p><p>“Of course I know. Do you think Rookwood failed to report his observations? He just didn’t receive instructions about them, but of course he was planning to betray and arrest Bellatrix, her behaviour had become highly suspicious—everything was sent to us. She just got to him first. Oh, and it gets better, mudblood, it gets better! Did you know that once upon a time she requested your execution? It was during your escape attempt across the North Sea, mud. She went to Dolohov and requested it personally as a favour. The woman you’re fucking wanted you dead once, treated it as important enough to ask …”</p><p>Pansy spun around with desperate urgently. Hermione moved with her offhand to direct a curse at her, but the Parkinson woman managed to block it as she turned back—having just blocked another from down the bay, where the men who had loosed the lines had returned from their mission.</p><p>She got the first two, but she didn’t get the third. With the port shaft now under power, Vadim had made his way up-deck too. <em> His </em>sectumsempra tore through Pansy Parkinson’s torso with a horrifying power and extent, the young woman’s expression freezing in a pain too great to scream.</p><p>For all Pansy had been wicked to her, and everyone around her, it was still a pang of discomfort, for Hermione to watch a former Hogwarts classmate take an obviously mortal wound. They had been schoolgirls who had detested each other, but they had just been <em> schoolgirls. </em></p><p>Pansy sank to the deck with her eyes wide, and Hermione staggered forward and knelt alongside of her—so that her blood was dripping down on the places where Pansy’s blood flowed. It all looked the same, there was no mud to mingle with the pure. The shouts behind them assured Hermione that the rest of the team was quickly being dealt with.</p><p>“You think that’s all?” Pansy asked, a coughing, dark laugh as she forced herself to speak. “Fuck, you think that’s everything? Hey, muddy, do you know what she did? She kidnapped a child, used polyjuice… She roped two muggle families into being part of her distraction… That’s how she escaped from Britain. They were executed to clean up the mess. That’s the kind of woman who was fucking you in Yalta, you mudblood dyke. You can sleep easily next to her? Muggles are just tools to her. Your own parents are just tools. Treason will never change that attitude in her.” The Parkinson girl’s laughter now brought blood to her lips, but laugh she did as she spoke those words up at Hermione.</p><p>Hermione went as cold and stiff as she could. <em> Oh My God. Merlin. She would have, wouldn’t she? </em></p><p>But something snapped into place, hard and tight and quick, in her heart. “Bella didn’t murder anyone. You did. The Morsmordre did. You had a choice. You didn’t have to kill anyone.” She reached for her belt, and drew her service pistol.</p><p>“Oh fuck me, Muddy, you’re going to shoot me?” Now Pansy’s voice shook. “I thought you were the big human rights activist. Look, fuck, Muddy… I don’t want to go to a camp. I don’t mind if you don’t heal me. But kill me with magic. If you’re a big enough girl to kill me, I’m a witch, pureblood for three thousand years, I deserve to die by magic as I lived by it, damn it, muddy, if I’m going to die, kill me with magic…”</p><p>The killing curse degraded you, it damaged your soul. This probably would too, but sometimes, it was the principle of a thing that mattered.</p><p>The crack of a pistol rang out through the hangar deck of the <em> Varyag. </em></p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Matched against five wizards of the Morsmordre, Bellatrix was magnificent for her bold contempt of danger. She fought against the boarders, as the others aboard the <em> Mikhail Kutuzov </em> did. From the shore, a few more wizards poured fire on them—a <em> Bombarda </em>smashed into the hull, but this old ship with her armour stood up to it better than a modern one would.</p><p>On the decks, magical energies slamming into wands, holding them—wand to wand—across the decks, they caused fires, they killed members of the crew as collateral damage, but the <em> Kutuzov</em>’s guns thundered again and again, hammering the Morsmordre positions in the city. The gun crews had a bold contempt for danger, too. With their ship boarded by sixteen enemy sorcerers, any one of whom could likely kill the crew, if unprotected, in seconds, they simply ignored the fight that was happening around them, and served their guns as fast as they could.</p><p>Then, as Bellatrix had one of her enemies down, and summoned a sharp “<em>Avada Kedavra</em>!” to keep him that way, a MILAN ATGM fired from the shore exploded within feet of her—she whipped back a wordless <em> Protego </em>as fast as thought. Shrapnel was fast, too, and her uniform was perforated with tiny little specks, the larger ones successfully held back, the concussive blast moderated.</p><p>She glared at the shore for a moment, and with a wicked gleam in her eyes, unleashed Fiendfyre on the rough position of the offending missile crew. The horrifying power of a living fire ripped through the rubble, and men and vehicles in the position vanished, briefly becoming human torches.</p><p>Bellatrix just managed the next <em> Protego </em>with blood dripping from her wand-arm, as her opponents, seven in number now, pressed her. Help was coming up fast, though, two more of the wizards in her service met them and drove them back.</p><p>The <em> Kutuzov </em>swung in the current, flames flickering around her side, and one of her 10cm secondary gun turrets knocked out by something, magical, or artillery firing on open sights from the shore, who knew. The St. Andrew’s Cross was still flying, the 15.2cm guns were still thundering their shells against the shore. From the massed artillery on the opposite bank of the Dnepr, the whole of the skyline behind them was aflame, and rare indeed was a moment when Fiendfyre was lost in a backdrop of greater incendiary destruction.</p><p>Then, as the turn was completed, the moment seized itself in Bella’s heart—the reason for her fighting was visible in front of her, they faced her bow on – <em> Varyag, </em> the great carrier, running free and clear above the thalweg of the river. While she had fought and carried on her diversion, the carrier had come free upstream, turned outboard of the <em> Kutuzov, </em>and was now running down-river.</p><p>While the men on the other beam of the ship had seen her before, in the heavy fighting both against the shore and on her decks, the word had not been communicated to those on the cruiser’s starboard side. They broke out into cheers as they saw her. One member of the infiltration squad had already dared to reach the bridge tower, now that the enemy aboard her was suppressed. He could be seen, fixing a flag carried wrapped around his chest, below his bullet-proof vest, in combat. Unrolling it and affixing it to the rusty lanyards, he hauled on them until and it fluttered up to the masthead of the carrier.</p><p>Again, a cheer swept across the decks of the <em> Kutuzov, </em> wounded sailors and men in damage control parties raising their fists to the sky and bellowing “<em>Urrah</em>!”--while her turrets swung back around to port—and resumed firing at the enemy as hard as they could. Bellatrix, of course, cared none for the flag of the Russian Navy.</p><p>But against her opponents, the cheering was profoundly demoralising. And she cared for what the symbol meant—that surely Hermione was over there, alive and successful. She fought all the harder for it, catching one of her foes with a <em> Confrigo </em> that sent him burning over the side. The others had had enough of it. They were despirited, and she was on the attack. The enemy fled, and in doing so, tacitly accepted the escape of the <em> Varyag. </em></p><p>Of course, the wizards may have fled, but the gunfire was still hammering down on the cruiser, which was travelling off the port side of the <em> Varyag, </em>having turned in a tighter circle than the big carrier. That meant that all the gunfire and missiles being directed against them—no anti-ship models, just anti-tank—were now slamming into her previously unengaged side, but hitting them nonetheless. For Bellatrix, remaining to starboard, it was still a respite. She hastened to the bridge.</p><p>“Captain!”</p><p>“We’re running to port of the channel, General, so please wait; we need to not run aground,” he answered with some irritation.</p><p>It was a Navy operation now.</p><p>Bellatrix seethed, but turned away, and looked longingly to the <em> Varyag. </em>As the moment of battle faded, an intense concern for Hermione Granger crept into her. They had only been parted by a few hundred metres, but it might as well have been half the world for all that either of them had the power to impact the fact of the other, it had seemed like a situation in which they were both completely helpless to impact the other, even as successful execution of the plan was critically important to their mutual survival. The temptation to apparate over to the carrier was almost overwhelming.</p><p><em> Damn it, Mudblood, get out of my heart. </em>She could say that, but the words melted as soon as the thought passed.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The next time that Hermione was really fully conscious, she found herself back in her quarters in Melitopol. The damage had not been severe; she had been treated, doped up on muggle medications, and giving healing potions to let the scars fade. Then, there had been the blur of bed-rest for the past few days.</p><p>She remembered Bellatrix dropping by several times while she was drugged and half-conscious, but couldn’t recall their conversations. Hermione just had to been content in the belief they were good, or perhaps Bellatrix ranting about how stupid someone was; either one would be fine.</p><p>The chance of Bellatrix or anyone else coming any time soon was small. Hermione found a book next to her bed, and rolled over to grab for it. <em> Witch Queens of Britannia and the Fight against Rome. </em></p><p>That was definitely a wizarding title. And it was definitely the kind of book that Bellatrix would get ahold of. Hermione couldn’t help but grin.</p><p>Certainly, two hours into the secret history of the use of magic against the Roman Empire—the stuff which had been erased from muggle history books with the Statute, if it had ever been properly recorded to begin with—she started to feel like her normal self. The History of Magic had been an awful subject at Hogwarts, the only way to learn about it was reading.</p><p>She needed the reading, because if she had just sat there and dwelled on things in bed, she would be dwelling on the fact that a few days or a week or however long ago it had been, sitting on the deck of a rusty, unfinished aircraft carrier, she had shot a mortally wounded Pansy Parkinson to death with her service pistol.</p><p>In actual truth, it was not a worse death than the Killing Curse. Hermione had aimed a single bullet at point-blank into the mortally wounded woman’s heart. In fact, Pansy had asked to die, she had just demanded a death by magic for the exact same notions of pureblood supremacy that Hermione detested. Magic and a gun both left you dead, dead, dead. POWs were not abused, but there was not food enough for the civilians, that was objective fact.</p><p>But a part of her was terrified that she had taken her first step toward becoming like Ron. That she had … <em> No, you’re afraid because you’re not afraid. </em></p><p>It all been matter-of-fact, and perhaps that had been for best. Before, she had fought hard and not feared death, but she had never done anything quite like that before.</p><p>And now she had, and she was more okay with it than she wanted to be, and she wasn’t sure if it was being around Bellatrix or just the enduring war that was eroding her own moral convictions.</p><p>The thought chilled her to the bone, even in the relative warm of the room in what was now truly the spring in the southern Ukraine. It brought to mind what Pansy had told her, before she had died.</p><p>So, when after another four hours, Bellatrix entered the room, Hermione knew what she wanted to ask.</p><p>Then Bella exploded the scenario of what would happen—a usual droll ‘Granger’, some snide comment—it would all be the same.</p><p>“Hermione, you found the book.”</p><p>“I… I did.” She looked up into Bella’s eyes, though there was no sign of the woman’s true thoughts there. In that, Bellatrix still showed either her madness, or the typical reserve of a pureblood.</p><p>“Good. You would have twisted yourself into knots otherwise. I do know how you work, now.” A trace of bemusement, and perhaps it was predatory. “You may get ‘Hero’ yourself for this one. They would like to decorate someone who is not me or one of my troops.” Bellatrix paced over to the side of Hermione’s bed. “But it will take a few months to process.”</p><p>“They always do… I’ll share the medal with Draco, then…” She laughed softly, and tinged with hysteria. Bella acting compassionate and informal drew everything out from her. “I’m still not quite sure how he did it, but now he likes this Norwegian quote-- ‘the difference between a hero and a dead man is that the hero hangs on for one second longer.’”</p><p>“War has been good for him,” Bellatrix acknowledged.</p><p>“Was has been good… So fucking strange. I guess.” Hermione shook her head and looked up, her face hardening. “Bella… I shouldn’t get a medal. I mean, even with magical treatment, she was probably going to die, but I shot Pansy Parkinson through the heart.”</p><p>Bellatrix shrugged. “You and ten thousand other CIS soldiers in this war. A report <em> was </em>given to me from the rest of the operational force. I don’t think you did anything wrong. Sometimes the best mercy is helping someone to die.”</p><p><em> I don’t think you did anything wrong. </em> Hermione froze. <em> I don’t think you did anything wrong. </em>The Longbottoms, Sirius, her sundry victims at Hogwarts, at other places she had participated in attacks on over the years, the nuclear war—she hadn’t dared, she realised suddenly, ask Bellatrix how much responsibility she had for all of that-- the invasion of Italy, the operations in the South of Russia…</p><p>“Of course you didn’t think I did anything wrong,” Hermione answered, her voice colder. “No, I understand all too well. Answer me two questions?”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“Because you cared about me enough to fuck me, so answer two questions, <em>please!</em>” Hermione tossed the book to the other side of the bed and ran a hand through her hair, staring up, and wincing in pain at where scar tissue tugged.</p><p>“And here I thought this was a nice afternoon. Whatever, Granger, if you insist.”</p><p>“She told me that you asked Dolohov to have me killed, when Dumbledore’s Army and the Order escaped from Britain,” Hermione began. “Is it true?”</p><p>“Of course it is,” Bellatrix answered, then hesitated. “Of course it is. Granger, I… You fought very well at Hogwarts. You refused to break, when I broke you – you came back, you refused to be broken. I wanted to honour you as my enemy with a clean death.”</p><p>Hermione closed her eyes and thought of Pansy Parkinson. She swallowed convulsively. “And your escape from Britain? She told me about that, too.”</p><p>“A harmless polyjuice potion for a child that would last a week with an extender capsule in the stomach—also harmless. I harassed a few muggles into collaborating with me, and then let them go, perfectly unharmed. It was necessary to save my daughter’s life.”</p><p>“Voldemort had them all executed. Even the child,” Hermione answered darkly. “All of them.”</p><p>Bellatrix froze, and started sharply at Hermione.</p><p>“You knew it would happen, didn’t you?”</p><p>“That’s three questions, Granger,” Bellatrix abruptly snapped, and stormed from the room.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>MILAN ATGM -- Missile d'infanterie léger antichar, "Anti-tank guided missile". These two things mean almost the same, but MILAN refers to a specific model of French manufactured ATGM in general classification.<br/>thalweg--a line alone the deepest point of the channel of a river.<br/>St. Andrew's Cross--the naval ensign of the Russian Federation, and before it, the Empire.<br/>"Underweigh" -- also spelled "Underway", this word is a specific nautical term derived from "steering way" (or steering weigh, which is pretty archaic). Having "steering way" means that you are going fast enough that the rudder will actually do something--rudders require flow past them for the ship to actually turn. In a sailing ship this meant speed, but in a modern powered vessel it can mean speed OR flow generated by the propeller or pump-jet.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0042"><h2>42. The Measure of Morality</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Measure of Morality</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Hermione did not see Bellatrix again until she was cleared to resume her duties. It left her feeling lonely, and wondering what had passed between them, and regretful that she couldn’t exactly remember it, when she had been doped up on painkillers. She certainly knew that her confrontation with Bellatrix had been the cause for her losing the visits, and she roundly cursed the part of her that regretted <em>that. </em>She wanted the memories of Bellatrix being nice to her, and yet, she also was proud she had stood up to the woman’s record. It seemed there was no more lonely place in the world than to be in love with someone you also couldn’t help but acknowledge was objectively evil.</p><p>For all that it seemed that Bellatrix avoided her when she was recovering, Hermione was relieved to see that she was not persona non grata generally. She had an appointment the same evening as the first day of her return to duty—to meet with the General privately. Of course, being as it was in her official calendar, it was likely about business. But the part of Hermione that refused to be silent cheered that her working relationship with Bella had least been unaffected.</p><p>Hermione made sure that she was in her best service uniform, and pinned and straightened her hair into enough order to be regulation—it had only grown out longer during her convalescence. Though their hair was, in some ways, very different, in other ways, Hermione knew that Bella and herself both had to spend a lot of time on hair spells, and that was in some way comforting, as well.</p><p>At the appointed time, she arrived in front of the door, and knocked. It was later in the evening, and she was not surprised to see Bellatrix wearing only about half her uniform with a dressing gown tossed over the rest of it. In that effortlessly aristocratic way, Bella made it look positively gorgeous.</p><p>“Come in, Colonel,” she addressed Hermione before turning back to where two chairs were set out, and music was gently playing from an old Soviet record player that was built like a tank. Hermione began to follow her, and paused, and shivered, recognising the song. “<em>Manuscript,</em>” she said with a breathless whisper.</p><p>“As it happens,” Bellatrix answered with an indifferent smirk, as she gestured to the teapot, but certainly didn’t pour it for Hermione, “Narcissa saved some of my old records from the family house in France. And a few photographs and paintings, apparently.”</p><p>The song dominated her thoughts as she poured out her tea.</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Prince Louis Battenberg is burning the Admiralty lights down low;</em></p><p>
  <em>Silently sifting through papers sealed with a crown.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Admiral Lord Fisher is writing to Churchill, calling for more Dreadnoughts.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The houses in Hackney are all falling down.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And my grandmother sits on the beach in the days before the war;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>A young girl writing her diary, while time seems to pause;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Watching the waves as they come one by one to die on the shore;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Kissing the feet of England.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>The Lights of St. Petersburg come on as usual;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Although the air seems charged with a strangeness of late, yet there's nothing to touch.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And the Tsar in his great Winter Palace has called for the foreign news;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>An archduke was shot down in Bosnia, but nothing much…”</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Hermione mixed in some chilled evaporated milk until the tea was a comfortable brown, and wondered at the song, the whispering hints of normal life, about to vanish at the beginning of another war. One of all too many wars that the 20<sup>th</sup> century had seen—now three—which had almost torn the world to shreds. “I admit,” she said softly over the song as it continued, “that I had thought this would be about business, General.”</p><p>“It is about business, Granger, but it’s about the business of you and I,” Bella answered, looking up from her tea. The way she said it made Hermione’s heart sharply skip a beat.</p><p>Then, like she always did, Bellatrix jinked in an unexpected direction. The known unknown of her behaviour—you could count on the unexpected. “So, are you prepared to recant your haughty elitism to me?” Bella held her mug of tea, concealing the lower part of her face, like a parapet she were covering behind.</p><p><em>Wait what? </em>Hermione’s brain froze for a moment at the sudden accusation, especially with how ridiculous it seemed.</p><p>“Well, we’ll refuse the wand hand for this,” Bella allowed after a moment, amusement laced in her voice, using a term from duelling that was colloquialism to pureblood society. “I know about your parents.”</p><p>Hermione froze <em>generally </em>at that, a pallor crossing her face, white as a sheet, a look of horror spreading. “What… What’s happened to them?”</p><p>“A young British witch decided in her infinite wisdom to completely erase all of their memories of the existence of their beloved only daughter from start to finish, leaving them with an uneasy hollow sense in their lives as the childless couple was left to, ultimately, fight on their own to survive in Australia. Nobody knows what happens next of course. But do you really think our internal security services weren’t able to piece together that much? Oh sure, we didn’t track them down in Australia, but that was only due to the disruption of the war and not controlling the entire country.”</p><p>Hermione sank back in her chair with a spasmodic mixed sense of relief, confusion, and distaste. She didn’t know where Bellatrix was going, this seemed crazier and more disjointed than usual and made her think of the bad old Bellatrix, <em>who is exactly the same Bellatrix who is in front of you this very instant talking like this, </em>the nasty voice inside of her head reminded her.</p><p>Bella gave her a dainty grin of bemusement and kicked back, as well, crossing her legs sharply. “Come on, Granger. You’re supposed to be the brightest witch of your age. But I suppose all of these modern muggle ideologues have rotted out your head, now haven’t they?” Her expression flashed into a nasty glare. “I don’t like being accused of being a crazy criminal by the kind of pocket totalitarian who thinks she can reengineer the personalities of her own family for ‘their own good’,” she said, the words cutting sharply. “Perhaps you should think twice before accusing me of being cognizant to the fact that Voldemort, in the end, did put those muggles to death. Perhaps you should ask yourself if you are, in fact, better than me. Because I was raised in a belief, in tradition, and blood, and lineage, which endured for thousands of years, and I was prepared to die to defend it. You, it appears, were raised with an ideological conviction that if your morals align with all the petty tricks of modern times, all the rot about human rights and democracy and self determination and whatever else the muggles came up with when it was Tuesday, that you have the right to do whatever you want to enforce them, no matter how grotesque it really is.”</p><p><em>The Brightest Witch of Her Age. </em>Hermione felt pinned – just like she had been all those years before. That time, it had been physical. This time, it was intellectual. It was just as awful. With her legs crossed, her pose absolutely confident, her tea cupped in both hands, those sharp dark eyes, marked with grey shadows of exhaustion around them, but still lively and smart and beautiful, bored into her. They wouldn’t let Hermione go. They demanded, her own heart demanded, that she consider the argument.</p><p>She couldn’t dismiss it, and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t find it wanting, either. Slowly, her self-esteem began to melt in a puddle as Bellatrix held her gaze fixed at her, sharply unblinking.</p><p>“Well?” The Dark Witch prompted.</p><p>“I wanted to keep them safe,” Hermione answered, choking the words out as she clattered her cup down, barely avoiding spilling it. Tears leapt up in her eyes, unbidden, demanding, she started to sob. “Merlin, Bella, I <em>wanted to keep them safe.</em>” She felt a dull hollowness inside, that her parents still might be dead, that it still might all be for nothing, that she had made herself unknown to her own parents.</p><p>Bellatrix sat her own cup down, and pushed herself up, and with measured steps, moved to loom over the still-sitting Hermione. “All well and good, Granger. You wanted to keep your family safe. I wanted to keep my younger sisters safe when I agreed to serve Voldemort. The scandal I had gotten myself into could have ruined their marriage prospects just like it did mine. Sometimes, even after I burned her image off the family tapestry, I imagined that Andromeda had only dated Ted Tonks out of hopelessness that she’d ever find a real husband, a pure husband, and that it was my fault, my fault for being a wild, muggle-music-loving dyke. And I could only gain penance for driving my sister into the arms of mud by enduring my marriage and being the best servant of the Dark Lord that I could be. Do you understand what that felt like? I was happy on Narcissa’s wedding day even as I was sad I was losing her, because it meant I had least saved my baby sister, I had given her a pure and happy marriage, I had managed to repair half of the scandal I caused. I was not the utter ruination of my sisters. Only half of them,” she spat with the bitter pathos of decades of regret that had built up around her soul until she only knew fury and hatred. “It’s so hard to hate someone and love them at the same time, but I’ve held those emotions for Andromeda for decades now, just like I did to my parents before that, and for as long as they lived. But it pales toward what you feel at that moment when you try to save your family and you know absolutely that you’ve failed, now, doesn’t it?”</p><p>“Yes, I do,” Hermione agreed, shaking her head slowly, and still crying. “Merlin, but I do. We… Where the hell did I go wrong?”</p><p>“Did you? Isn’t family worth everything?” Bellatrix shrugged, but then her expression turned into a glare down at Hermione, that even the combat veteran shied away from. “But are you going to tell me that I did wrong by saving my daughter’s life? <em>Are you going to tell me that?</em> How dare you! You did the <em>exact same thing. </em>At least my ‘victims’ had their lives and memories and minds intact when I left them—no, I didn’t realise that they would be executed. Perhaps I should have, but I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about saving my daughter’s life! And you weren’t thinking about the injurious consequences of your own actions when you twisted your own parents’ minds, now were you? You had one objective—that they were to remain alive! Well, good for you, because in fact you succeeded. The Dark Lord would have killed them, or worse. If they’ve died in Australia, it was because of the usual consequences of the war, and much less painful, and, you bought them years more of life. But you don’t dare suggest you’re more righteous than I am, Granger. We’re both in this to guarantee that our families survive—that’s what life came down for us. You did what you thought you had to toward that end, and so did I.”</p><p>Hermione rubbed at her eyes, shuddering convulsively. “I don’t want to think about it, Bella. I don’t want to think about it. I… I reprogrammed my own parents like something out of a science fiction dystopia. Okay. Is that what you wanted to hear, Bella? God, is that what you wanted to hear!?”</p><p>“Yes, actually,” Bellatrix answered, and reached down, and pulled Hermione up to her into the tightest hug that Hermione had ever known. It was gentle and strong all at once, the shorter woman had been getting steadily more fit the longer she had spent out of Azkaban, and in the field, eating her fill and exercising. Her body was battered, and amputations and age took their toll, but in some respects Bellatrix was healthier now than she had been since the early eighties… She might as well have been Hermione’s own age, and in the height of health, for all Hermione cared at that moment. Even from the golden artificial arm, buried under clothes, she felt warmth. She felt it in every way that this little woman held her, and held her so firmly.</p><p>Hermione felt the tension melt away from her body, and she shivered, and choked in the air. “I’m sorry, Bella. You’re right, I was arrogant.” But a twinge of a smile touched her lips. “...Of course, so are you.”</p><p>“Well, I’m a Black,” Bella answered, as if that explained <em>everything. </em>Perhaps it did. Perhaps the difference between them was the difference between Aristocrat and Bourgeoisie, and not much more.</p><p>The young witch had been dragged down a rabbit hole where she was no longer sure what redemption was, and where she wondered if she needed it as badly as Bellatrix. The unkind reminder her body gave her of how wonderful a cigarette before bed would be seemed to add extra weight to the thought.</p><p>“I’m going to send you back to Astana,” Bellatrix gently released Hermione, and left the young witch with a pang of longing, at the separation, and the promise of a more complete separation as well.</p><p>“No, please!” She exclaimed with a shudder before she could think. “I want to stay here, not just for the oath, but because I want to help you win, Bella!”</p><p>“You’ll be doing that. I need you to play the British contribution to the Norway operation with Narcissa. We only need six divisions here; she wants to send the other six to Norway, following the plan developed to decisively end the Scandinavian front, and free up the troops there. Liberating Norway would also give us a base of operations against Britain. So I agreed. It means using the Army on two fronts, but it gives us more visibility—and I don’t think Nazarbayaev trusts us enough to commit all of the divisions in one place, anyway.”</p><p>Hermione wiped her eyes. “So I’ll return when that’s done?”</p><p>“Yes, it will just be a temporary detail,” Bellatrix assured her, and stretched out to run her hands through Hermione’s hair for a moment, her cap a toppled memory, hanging on the side of the table. But she didn’t quite embrace her.</p><p>Hermione still shivered and craned her head back for a moment.</p><p>“You should have never cut it,” Bellatrix remarked softly.</p><p>“You would say that,” Hermione laughed. “And you’ve been a General this entire time, you never slept rough in a field encampment.”</p><p>Bellatrix sniffed. “Learn more hair-care magic.”</p><p>Later on, Hermione would reflect that it was first time she really had a <em>normal </em>exchange with Bellatrix, hot on the heels of being forced to confront an utterly disquieting question about the limits of her morality, and just how different from Bellatrix she really was.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The City of al-Qamishli was the last major town of any kind of importance remaining in the hands of the Syrian Arab Army. The terrain began to get rugged and high only a few kilometres to the north, but to the west they faced the Morsmordre across open ground, protected only by massive trenches and berms thrown up by combat bulldozers. There were the remnants of five divisions here, but in strength, they only amounted to two.</p><p>Around them, elements of Kurdish militias had also dug-in. Kurds were fighting to the north, where the shattered Turkish government did not have enough troops to resist their declarations of independence, let alone help support the territory to resist the advance of the Morsmordre. And so they uneasily fought together, wondering about a future when, perhaps after this war was over, they would have to fight another one hot on its heels.</p><p>The forces in the local area had already been working to evacuate refugees from the city, but there were still a very large number. The camps, the old vehicles in huge numbers, with people sleeping under sheets spread off their sides, the tents, the improvised lodgings in ruined buildings—Larissa had seen it before, in China, in Moldavia. In the Ukraine, during the retreats. There were hundreds of thousands of them spread out on the plains behind and to the north of the city, all desperate for freedom and survival, but needing, too, the simple matter of food. The way they were so thin had grimly told the Russian officers arriving, that these people were already used to starving. Larissa could easily imagine the countless among their number who had already fallen out to die alongside the line of march, so punishing for civilians. She could certainly see the graves of those who had expired after their arrival in al-Qamishli.</p><p>“We try to feed them, of course, but we have other things to do with our magic,” Zoë said as she led Larissa into the old City Hall, which had been seized as the headquarters (a common enough expedient), the MinKol witch doffing her cap as she entered, and pulling off her gloves. There was dust inside the door, but a few carpets had been laid down. “Nobody likes to see dying muggles.”</p><p>“Is the President here?” She asked, looking around at the staff.</p><p>“No,” the Palmyran woman replied with a shrug. “You will be meeting our own leadership.”</p><p>“Of course.” Larissa followed her in, to meet with the wizards and witches remaining from the Syrian Ministry. She was served a small glass cup, filled with extremely sweet tea, cut with mint, and invited to sit. “Thank you.”</p><p>“So,” Zoë turned to her. “We need evacuation for the people, but the rail links are broken; we would have to have vehicle convoys as far as Tatvan.”</p><p>“Then the ferry, then the railway through Tabriz?” Larissa thought about it for a moment, sipping the sweet tea. Luna had peeled off the moment they arrived, to speak with the Yazidi refugees.</p><p>“That’s so. We don’t have enough vehicles and we don’t have enough fuel,” the woman replied. “There’s at least a hundred thousand people here, Councillor.”</p><p>“We’re deploying troops to the front, you know.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>Larissa closed her eyes for a moment. “It would be a hard ride of many hours north, but perhaps the tank transporters and the other empty lorries delivering the units could be tapped to evacuate refugees to the north, where there is at least a chance of feeding them, and keeping them out of the hands of the Morsmordre. We will be deploying reinforcements for the Iraqis along the same route, and also sending supplies. It will be a tough ride. Open flatbeds for hours, for people, the wind and sun on them the whole time. Or clinging to the sides of tanker lorries.” Many would protest it would be a security risk, as well, but that would be true only for the columns they were in, of empty transports. The Kamaz drivers would be willing to handle it, they’d execute orders for this mission just like for risking their lives to bring supplies to the front.</p><p><em>Well, screw </em> <em>anyone who says no. </em> <em>We’ll do it. </em>“We can make the effort. Once they’re on Lake Van, it will be much easier to evacuate them.” So many times in this war, humanitarian concerns simply had to be ignored out of cruel necessity. Perhaps, Larissa was only caring about them now because it served her strange search. But she resolved to care.</p><p>“Thank you, Councillor.” Zoë sighed and shuddered. Larissa could see that the proud woman absolutely detested being reduced to a refugee and beggar, but would do her duty to her nation and people nonetheless.</p><p>She was about to offer some kind words, for all the good they would do, when Luna burst in.</p><p>“Councillor, I’ve found something <em>interesting</em>.”</p><p>People paid attention when Luna Lovegood used that word.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>With the Floo and Portkey networks still being restored in western Russia, Hermione ended up travelling like a regular Army officer. She would take a military field transport from Melitopol to Saratov, and then fly from Saratov to Astana in the jumpseat of another transport plan, making a supply run. They always had some spare capacity for a few officers on important missions to endure a few hours in the canvas fold-down seats squirrelled in behind the cockpit.</p><p>She’d occupied herself on the flight to Saratov by reading Suetonius. She was not Bellatrix’s girlfriend. That, at least, was what she told herself. But now, Hermione was left with the sense that Bella wanted a relationship at some level. She was being kind in a way she had not been kind before.</p><p>She had forced Hermione to confront what she had done for her family. To her family. That one—that was a damned tough bullet to chew. She had felt Bellatrix’s hug with relief, but it also felt like the damned forgiving the damned. The more she thought about it, the more she ruminated on those seeds of doubt, the more furious with herself Hermione got.</p><p>The arrival at Tsentralny Airport mercifully removed the train of thought before it got any worse. With the other soldiers aboard transferring to new assignments, she grabbed her duffel bag and stepped down the air-stairs and across the tarmac, spattered with a light spring rain, and leaving the commandeered former civilian An-148 behind, stepped inside. She had two hours before her connection, and there was at least a cafe. Since all civilian air travel had been halted inside of the CIS, only military and defence personnel on critical missions were travelling by air, and that meant the food service was not quite so terrible as it could be. She was able to get herself some tea, and blintzes filled with some ground meat.</p><p>A few pensioners were, Hermione surmised from their activities, apparently given nominal salaries to keep the terminal clean and put some cuttings of flowers out to make it a little more welcoming for the soldiers passing through, but the reality of the war still made it careworn despite their efforts. They were thin, and it made Hermione feel guilty even as she was eating and drinking and watching them go about their efforts. Then, a familiar voice jolted her out of her reverie with a shock that travelled up her spine.</p><p>“‘Mione.”</p><p>Hermione jerked up. “...Ron.” He was in uniform like her, with more medals than she had, but the same rank now. His hair was dyed, a roguish wave to it with some hair grease, dyed dark black.</p><p>“I thought you were only going to call me Strelkov,” he answered with a distant look as he moved to sit, without asking first. He had his own food from the counter, and Hermione shrugged and gestured her acquiescence, anyway. There was no need to start a fight.</p><p>“Time heals all wounds,” Hermione answered with a neutral smile. “What are you doing in Saratov?”</p><p>“Passing through, like you, I expect.” He chuckled. “Time sure does heal all wounds. You’re working as a staff officer to Bellatrix Lestrange.”</p><p>“Black,” Hermione corrected.</p><p>“Hmm?”</p><p>“Bellatrix Black,” she repeated.</p><p>Ron rolled his eyes. “Whatever, ‘Mione. She’ll always be Bellatrix Lestrange to me, and I’ll always hear your screams while she tortures you above me.”</p><p>“Things change, Ron,” Hermione answered with a dull monotone, grabbing her teacup to stare into it. “And sometimes you choose to forgive people, even when you know they don’t deserve it, because you want to. It gives you power to do that.” It did make a thought in her mind, as clear as crystal, resolving like the ring of a bell—providing absolute certainty. “In fact, I think I’m at a stronger place with Bellatrix than I’ve ever been before. I think she respects me, maybe even as an equal, even if she can’t admit it to herself or anyone else, yet.”</p><p>Ron barked a single laugh. His old sense of humour was long gone, it sometimes seemed, but the world could still provide him bemusement. “Bellatrix. First-name basis, ‘Mione? ‘respects me, maybe even as an equal’? Is that the grounds for friendship, now? I <em>loved </em> you. And I didn’t do anything that I didn’t have to do. I sure as hell didn’t think you were ‘maybe an equal’. I thought you were <em>better </em>than me, and the day we began a relationship with each other was the happiest day of my life.”</p><p>“That may be, but it wasn’t for me,” Hermione answered. “It… Just didn’t really work from the start. I mean, I could have done it, Ron, but it never would have been right.” She was going to tell him that she was a lesbian, but a sudden fear gripped her heart. If she told him right now, right after their conversation about Bellatrix, would he realise that she was attracted to Bella? What the hell would he do?</p><p>
  <em>What the hell am I going to do? It will get to him eventually, should I just tell him now… Fuck, no, I’m not ruining my chance of a friendship with Ron by bringing this out too quickly. </em>
</p><p>“What was wrong with me, ‘Mione? Just not … I mean, I know you thought I changed, but before that? Why the hell the change from before when it was Chisinau this, Chisinau that, morality this, morality that and all that rot standing between us and Voldy?”</p><p>It was true. She’d already compromised herself with what she had already said to Ron. She couldn’t walk back now, though try as hard as she could, she couldn’t bring herself to admit <em>everything, </em>especially for a relationship with Bellatrix which, for all intents and purposes, didn’t really exist at the moment—even if both of them wanted it to.</p><p>So, she’d tell her truth, and try to get out before it went further. Hermione finished her food, tossed her tea back, and looked directly at him, with gentle brown eyes, trying to be as kind as she could. <em>I won’t tell him everything, but… </em>“Mostly, ‘Ron, it’s that you’re not a woman,” she said softly, and got up, walking as fast as she could for the womens’ restroom.</p><p>“Wait <em>what</em>, ‘Mione!? WHAT?”</p><p>A few of the other soldiers shot dirty looks at him, and with a look of confused frustration, he turned away. Hermione hastily went inside, and spent a long time freshening up. She was very, very thankful that they ended up not being on the same flight. She had said enough, for now, and couldn’t bring herself to even think of Ron learning the rest.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0043"><h2>43. Looking West</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Looking West</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Stepping off the aeroplane on the tarmac in Astana, a ZIL-41047 was waiting for her. Hermione paused for a moment. It was bearing Kazakh flags, so it was from one of the ministries, or the …</p><p>… The President’s office. Hermione stepped forward; the driver took her bag and put it in the boot after opening the door for her to get in. Hermione realised that as a mere Councillor of Witchcraft, she was going to meet the President of her Confederation. The only reason for that could be that the President wished information on Bellatrix from outside of Narcissa’s government-in-exile, surely. At the moment, Hermione couldn’t think of anything else.</p><p>She got in; for her, there was no explanation of where she was going, but the journey was short, and soon enough it was obviously toward the Presidential Palace. The limo pulled up, and this time a staff aide opened the door, and stood at attention to salute. She rose, putting on her high peaked cap and acknowledging the salute.</p><p>“Your bag will be delivered to your officer billet, Councillor.”</p><p>“Of course, Lieutenant,” Hermione acknowledged. “Please lead on.”</p><p>“Certainly, Councillor.” The officer led her up and inside the grand halls. Brand new, finished even as the war continued (some things would always remain priorities, even if not strictly military, and that was just the way of the world), it reflected a mix of the high classicism of Stalin’s socialist architecture with traditional Central Asian motifs, and as the standards of new Palaces went, it was not really that bad.</p><p>She was unobtrusively searched after they entered one wing of the palace, which told her they would be meeting with the President—they would not inconvenience a loyal witch for a lesser man. Hermione was then allowed to wash her hands, and pat her face down with a rag dripped in rosewater and smooth out her uniform to regulation.</p><p>Then, she was taken to a conference room, where Presidential Guards opened the door with sharply stiff-necked formality. Hermione stepped in.</p><p>“Councillor of Witchcraft Hermione Granger, of the Russian Federation,” one of the attendants announced in Russian, and then repeated it—in English, and added this at the end: “Your Majesty.”</p><p>Hermione came rigidly to attention.</p><p>Sitting across the table from President Nursultan Nazarbayev was His Majesty, Charles, King of the Commonwealth Nations. Uncrowned in Britain he had not taken a regnal name, and emphasized his authority as the head of the Commonwealth, to muster these nations in resistance to the power of Voldemort. He commanded the loyalty of the legitimist governments of Australia and New Zealand, the coalition government of South African indigenous wizards fighting against the Morsmordre-aligned Anglo-Boer wizards (Commonwealth identities and ethnicity were deeply complicated and sometimes contradictory matters, and the conventional, European-inspired wizardry of the settlers and the Coloured population were distinct from the indigenous wizardry of most of the bulk of the population, and provided the fault lines for the conflict, but his government had thrown supplies into Durban to support the later, and so gained their allegiance), and many other smaller Commonwealth realms. A man who had been unpopular in peace had proved himself indispensable in war, surviving in the house he had been provided in Melbourne where the government of Australia had provided him quarters, during the dispute between himself and his brother, when Voldemort’s regime in the UK, operating in the shadows, had claimed he had tried to launch a coup. With the government destroyed, he had rallied Australian resistance to the Japanese and their allied wizarding and conventional forces which, having seized control from the government of Japan, had dragged a cowed and pacifist nation into supporting a renewed war of conquest at Voldemort’s behest, reaching heights the old Empire had not obtained. He had mustered those resources, and fought, and fought well.</p><p>Some would say he was Hermione’s rightful sovereign.</p><p>President Nazarbayev smiled. “My pleasure to present the young Councillor, since you asked to meet some of the British who have taken service in the Confederal military, and she has shown herself of particular utility, both to our forces and by remove to your’s. She was instrumental in the defection of Bellatrix Black.”</p><p>“Your Majesty.” With her cap under one arm, Hermione tried approximately the appropriate bow.</p><p>“Councillor, or as I understand it, Colonel,” he greeted her with a nod. He was in uniform himself. “I understand you work closely with our forces, while remaining under the regular authority of the Russian Ministry.”</p><p>“That’s correct, Your Majesty. I am the commander of the liaison detachment of the Confederal Armed Forces to General Black’s headquarters.”</p><p>“General Black’s headquarters.” He shook his head for a moment. “Lady Narcissa is certainly a formidable woman. After the recent victory at Narrogin, we were finally able to resume direct communications with India, and thus the Confederation.”</p><p>“Perth has been liberated, Your Majesty?” Hermione expressed surprise, she was exhausted and busy and distracted, and hadn’t been watching the foreign news, apparently.</p><p>“Yes, we’ve pushed the enemy back into the northern tier, with the assistance of an Indian amphibious operation on the coast north of Perth,” Charles allowed with a smile. “It will finally allow for a proper allied conference, for the purpose of coordinating strategy.” He turned back to Nazarbayev. “You suggested Colombo, did you not, Mister President?”</p><p>“I did,” Nazarbayev agreed. “Somewhere close to India seems appropriate, particularly now that we have obtained their promise of an expedition force to support President Hussein, within the next sixty days.”</p><p>“The Indians are already fighting in East and South Africa, and my own Australia, but their strength is hardly tapped,” Charles agreed. “But at least they are fighting, the participation of other nations is only token.”</p><p>“This will begin to change, as we begin to win.”</p><p>“Indeed so,” Charles agreed with Nazarbayev’s sentiment. “Well, it’s been pleasant to meet you, Colonel. The President informed me you were here to brief Lady Narcissa?”</p><p>“Yes, that’s correct, Your Majesty.”</p><p>“Then we will meet again tomorrow. I’m here to confer with her as well as President Narabayev, and make a presentation. I think your attendance would be appropriate.”</p><p>“Of course, Your Majesty.”</p><p>“I understand you were part of the magical resistance movement to the,” the King’s face had been schooled from a young age not to admit expression, but evident distaste still crossed it, “so-called Dark Lord?”</p><p>“I was, Your Majesty,” Hermione affirmed. “I fought against him in the first battle of the Second Wizarding War, and ever since then.”</p><p>“You were one of the refugees General Tonks helped escape from Britain at the same time I did?”</p><p>“Yes, Your Majesty.” Hermione was not surprised to hear that Craig Tonks had ended up on active service with the Commonwealth forces in Oceania, and was now a General.</p><p>“Excellent officer. I understand his sister-in-law is Lady Narcissa’s older sister?”</p><p>Charles certainly knew the answer to that, but Hermione nodded and supplied the answer. “Yes, they were all involved in our escape. Craig, Andromeda, Narcissa. Andromeda was like a mother to us exiles.”</p><p>“I’ve certainly only heard fine things about her, Colonel. Your own family?”</p><p>“In Australia, but missing,” Hermione answered, feeling uncomfortable.</p><p>“If you provide my staff some information tomorrow, we will make enquiries,” he offered with a reassuring smile, well-practised. Doubtless he’d had to say such a thing to thousands of service-men he had had such an exchange with. “Well, the Russians seem to keep you well-fed, so I will see you tomorrow, and trust all is well,” he added, with the relative informality he had adopted with the soldiers of this war—not like Sovereigns, in private discourse, used the ‘we’ of formal letters, anyway; Hermione knew that much.</p><p>“You are dismissed, Councillor,” Nazarbayev instructed her.</p><p>Hermione came to attention, saluted, and was escorted out. The rest of the meeting was between the two Heads of State. She felt immensely relieved that she had <em>not </em>been asked to report on Bellatrix to the President of the Confederacy. In seemed a way like a conflict of loyalty she had already acquired.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>An hour later, Hermione was in Narcissa’s office at her headquarters in the old Architecture Institute, carrying the attache case filled with the documents she had developed with Generals Dodson and Diaz, with Bellatrix’s overarching input. In fact, Bellatrix usually just described what she had in mind, and let them do all the work, and then reviewed it and made comments, which were often snarky and/or trenchant, but less so with their work than anyone else’s. Arriving at Narcissa’s headquarters, Hermione could see that, in the past months, the British Government in Exile had developed into a substantial organisation within that respectable building which still left Hermione feeling a bit nervous, especially now that it made meeting with Narcissa feel like meeting with an actual Head of State.</p><p>But Narcissa, once behind closed doors, greeted her warmly. “Hermione Granger. Please, have a seat and some tea.”</p><p>“Of course, M’lady. Thank you.” There was one more thing that made it much more welcoming than meeting with a regular Head of State—Delphini Black was in the corner, working on a magical colouring book.</p><p>She looked up with a bright and clever expression. “How’s mum?” Delphi asked quite deliberately to Hermione.</p><p>“Doing very well, Delphi,” Hermione couldn’t help but smile. “Your mother is terrifically smart and very much in charge on the front. I’m happy to help her. What’s your colouring book on?”</p><p>“Shapes of all the magically hidden islands in the world,” the girl answered promptly, and held it up. “I’m colouring Hy-Brasil right now! Mum likes you,” Delphi then added with big eyes. “She wouldn’t be so nice if she didn’t! Auntie Narcissa tells me in the future muggleborns shall be treated the same as purebloods, too, and that I shouldn’t be ashamed for being half-blooded. I didn’t realise I was half-blooded, because I thought daddy was special.”</p><p>Hermione kept her smile. The girl was precociously intelligent. “Well, you <em>shouldn’t </em>be ashamed, and yes, you are half-blooded, and that’s something it’s perfectly fine to be happy for.”</p><p>“You can speak with Colonel Granger later, dear. Can you find Lieutenant Roberts on your own? The Colonel and I need to have a private conversation,” Narcissa instructed to Delphi then.</p><p>Delphi looked sad, but Narcissa’s expression was serious, so she nodded. “Yes Auntie Narcissa, I can find her.” She took her colouring book and magic pen which she could concentrate on to change the colours, and rose. “You’re neat,” she confided in Hermione, adding, “tell me more about what mum’s done,” before she went out the door.</p><p>“If I had been exposed to Nymphadora at that age, I am… Well, I am not sure,” Narcissa admitted, and then looked sharply at Hermione. “<em>Is </em>Bellatrix well?”</p><p>“Yes, M’lady.” Hermione smiled, feeling gentle considering Narcissa’s warmth. “She gives as good as she takes, when it comes to our debates, and I am… I have a new appreciation for her, I believe.”</p><p>“I didn’t ask you why the two of you had … Gotten together,” Narcissa admitted, dancing around saying it explicitly, “and nor did I ask her. However, you are clearly bound to protect my sister, so I have confidence in your honesty.”</p><p>“Well, I… I don’t know much else of what to say. I think the command staff is well-organised, Bella is thoughtful and mentally put together… Her health is worn, but you knew that, it’s probably been that way since Azkaban. Actually, I think she’s being pretty normal, it’s encourage, really.”</p><p>“Encouraging?” Narcissa fixed an arched stare at her.</p><p>“<em>Madame Malfoy, I’m in love with Bellatrix. </em>I think she’s in love with me too. Or at least has feelings for me. I know, that at Christmas, I promised I would break up with her to Tonks, but..”</p><p>“Oh, Tonks--whatever she is calling herself--is being perfectly terrible about this,” Narcissa sighed, and waved a hand. “Miss Granger. Hermione, if you wish. I grew up in the shadow of Bellatrix’s scandal with de Lamar. I understand you are aware of it.”</p><p>Hermione nodded, but said nothing.</p><p>“I want my sister to be happy. Now, I don’t mean to understand Bella, but it’s always been hard for me to understand her, and I want to respect her freedom in this second chance she’s been granted. So, I am encouraging you to write to me as a friend, and let me know about any issue she has, or you have.” She didn’t exactly say she approved, but...</p><p>“Thank you, Madame Malfoy.”</p><p>“Oh, I’m doing it for Bella,” she smiled, and of that, Hermione had no doubt. “Shall we go ahead and get started with our review of the operational plans for the Bergen Operation?”</p><p>Hermione reached for her briefcase. It was time to get down to business, then. “Of course, M’lady.” She was itching to ask what the meeting with the King the next day was about, but it was not her place to ask. She would find out when it happened.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Larissa, Luna, and Zoë sat together on the roof of the City Hall in al-Qamishli. The night’s sky was alive with colour, all the stars in the world visible, for there was no electric power in the city anymore; the city was as dark as in older times. They were sheltered by half an old tent, fashioned into a sun-shade, and the smell and smoke of gas-fired pressure cookers and butane burners choked the night. Larissa drank coffee fresh-boiled over the butane, with a small measure of sugar, and cardamom, and acknowledged she would not be going to sleep anytime soon.</p><p>The scrolls were rolled open in front of them, and Luna looked at them with a sharp pleasure in her eyes. The text was in Kurmanji, of course, and they were being helped in the translation by a young Yezidi wizard. He did not much like being surrounded by three women who were all foreign to him, working magic which was a closely guarded secret to outsiders, but less of one in his community than the Wizarding Statute of Secrecy might have liked before the War. In the East, the lines were far more blurred—because there had not been lines at all, until a very late time.</p><p>Luna was producing a running translation for them, writing it down as she did. It was a historical account, of a powerful warlord during the reign of the Caliph Umar, during the conquest of the Sassanian Empire. This man, who had been a Turkic slave, and given the name of Abd’ul-Kabir, Slave of the Most Great, when freed upon his conversion to Islam.</p><p>“The Parley of the Wise Servants of Malak Tous, with the Abd’ul-Kabir, who served the Cruel One,” Luna began, adding, “that’s the epithet of the Caliph Umar.”</p><p>“Sounds about right,” Zoë shrugged. Larissa did not think it polite to ask her religion.</p><p>Luna, untroubled, continued. “Abd’ul-Kabir was sent among the mountains, to force the faithful to bow to the Cruel One and to adhere to the Book. He was accompanied at his side by a powerful sorcerer of the Persian court he held as his own slave, a eunuch with silk-smooth locks, who dressed in the clothes of a woman and spoke with a soft and pretty voice, words of power, that smashed the temples of fire. Abd’ul-Kabir had bound the eunuch with magic, at the promise of freedom when he learned a hundred powerful spells.”</p><p>“...Fire temple? I did not think the Yezidi had them.”</p><p>The young man shot a sharp look at her. “This is a matter we do not speak to outsiders about. We entrust you, for the sake of our survival.”</p><p>“Of course,” Larissa shook her head, and stared down into the grains of the coffee. It was said in the East, that one could tell fortunes from the way they swirled down at the bottom of the cup.</p><p>“So,” Luna continued, “the eunuch gave them the places of the fire temples, and Abd’ul-Kabir destroyed them. The places of power of the … Gods of God?”</p><p>“Supreme Angels of God, the Amesha Spentas,” the Syriac woman noted from her side, looking up at the sky.</p><p>“Alright, that makes sense,” Luna agreed. “Their places were destroyed, until one place remained, the place from which the form of God arises each day to bring blessings to the lands, which is that temple which is on Damawand, in the lake of the undying. Now, the people became fearful, because it is from the Lake of the Undying that the Heroes of the World drink, when they go to fight the <em>Vishapa </em>who would consume the world, which are bound under Damawand. So they formed an Army and faced Abd’ul-Kabir seven days march from Ardini.”</p><p>Larissa held up her hand, rubbing her forehead hard. “Damawand? So it is? Not Ararat? Because that’s the story that Master Flyorov found about Ararat, but now it’s about Damawand?”</p><p>“Well, historically, as opposed to the modern names, but…”</p><p>“That’s no sense anyway,” Zoë waved her hands, but also pointedly ignored what she hadn’t been told about. “That’s much too short of a time for an army to reach Damawand from Ardini, which is also Musasir, which means nobody knows where it is, anyway, but we know it was in the Zagros south of Lake Urmia. So, much too far west for a march of seven days to Damawand.”</p><p>“Might be too far south to reach Ararat in seven days from it, too,” Larissa shrugged. “More research on that. What next?”</p><p>“They parleyed over the temple. They offered to let Abd’ul-Kabir drink from the Lake of the Undying. He was greatly pleased by this, and agreed to keep the fire temple burning. But he refused to merely drink from the Lake of the Undying; he took its waters, and so the avatar of Malak Tous, the Angel of the World, the Simurgh, did descend back into the lake, and rise no more for fourteen days. Snow covered the land from the north to the south. The priests of the temple besieged Abd’ul-Kabir for ten and ten days, so that he sent his eunuch to summon aid. But instead of his kinsmen from the north, the eunuch summoned the Cruel One himself, who brought forth his hosts and put the temple to siege; Abd’ul-Kabir escaped with his cargo to the north. All was destroyed by the Cruel One, the path of the Simurgh was lost, and the land fell into drought.”</p><p>“That hardly helps us resolve <em>where </em>Ararat is, or how to get to it.”</p><p>“It’s half more than we had before,” Luna said with a happy shrug. “Perhaps we should look for Musasir? It seems though it should have been abandoned for centuries or more, that the Army to confront Abd’ul-Kabir—Koschei?--left from it; perhaps it’s a magical city, and not destroyed, but merely Unplottable.”</p><p>Larissa reached for a cigarette with a groan. Around her, a hundred thousand people were starving, massive armies were fighting. And there they were, trying to get ahead of Voldemort by… Looking for a lost city. “I’m imagining writing the explanation of this to Stavka. ‘<em>So, I want the resources to execute an archaeological expedition for an Unplottable City…</em>’” They weren’t going to solve the mystery of Ararat—or Damawand—in a day. And that was a problem. For that matter, she’d want a full professional translation from Luna’s notes instead of the brilliant but mad girl’s quick summary. All of that could be done at MinKol headquarters, all of it would take time, all of it would fight for resources. But perhaps Nymphadora Tonks had enough sway with whomever was really behind this effort to make it happen. She’d find out soon.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The next day, King Charles had gone to meet with Narcissa Malfoy before the ceremony. They had matters to attend to, after all, even if most of them had been decided in advance.</p><p>“Your Majesty,” Narcissa curtsied politely.</p><p>“By all means, have a seat, Madame Malfoy,” he acknowledged, going to his own in the small conference room in what was nominally the headquarters of His Government. Of course, the situation was far more complex than that.</p><p>Narcissa knew precisely how complicated it was. In fact, that her government was organised in Russia was likely not something that anyone else in the Commonwealth should have preferred. But it was organised in Russia because of the influence of the British wizarding exiles who had ultimately ended up in that country. Nearly the whole expatriate British wizarding population had been in the European Union, so when the nuclear exchange happened, the survivors could only flee Voldemort to the east, as millions of others had done and a large number of British muggles residing on the continent, as well. Before that beyond, Charles had organised a Council to represent the interests of overseas British in the Commonwealth, who had escaped persecution by the new regime in the UK. But the nine months between the seizure of power and the nuclear exchange had not allowed much time for this to form into a government, and as the dominant partner in the Allied Nations, the CIS had intervened in favour of the refugees’ council in Russia, where it could be observed.</p><p>That had given Narcissa her opening. Facing the prospect of bitter resistance from the organised Wizarding community which had nothing to lose, and their own fear and disorientation, she had presented herself as the ideal option—someone who could speak the pureblood language, encourage defections, promise a reasonable settlement—while acting within the democratic system. She had been like a lifeline of practical common sense and stability and a way to make sense of the magical world, to make it into something that could be dealt with by normal political means.</p><p>Naturally, during the reconciliation meetings between the two organisations, which had entailed making the risky trip to Melbourne, Narcissa had managed to impress the aristocrats around the exiled King. Her appointment had been a forgone conclusion at that point, but it had been extremely tenuous until Bella’s defection. In fact, that had been a gift-platter to her, because now she had more divisions in the field fighting against Voldemort than many countries, and she had been able to assume total responsibility, at least in theory, even for the British troops in Australia. Her government was now a true government in exile, fully formed.</p><p>Of course, the future of Britain when the exiles reclaimed her from Voldemort was a topic on which the ink flowed like blood. Narcissa had put an end to that debate.</p><p>“I have the agreement in hand, Your Majesty,” Narcissa offered, with the immaculate precision of any meeting of purebloods. She presented it. “It needs only your seal to confirm it. It contains the agreement of all the parties that the Monarchy will be restored, and, there will be no referendum.”</p><p>“The Wizengamot did not vote for the Parliament Act of 1911,” Charles read. Once, he had intended to take another regnal name, but not being formally crowned, the Australian media had just started calling him King Charles. Despite the unfortunate connotations, it had been impossible to undo. He looked up. “Madame Malfoy, you intend to call into account all the constitutional settlements of the twentieth century?”</p><p>“We will need to work out the exact nature of how Wizarding governance meets that of the rest of the Realm,” Narcissa replied, her eyes betraying nothing. “So, Your Majesty, the left sees it as a chance to get constitutional reform also. The right—also sees it that way. But this does not impact the position of the Monarchy. So it fits within our agreement, and I believe as the head of Your Government, Sire, if I desire a reform of the twentieth century’s constitutional system, I have the right to pursue it, according to the rules of Parliament.”</p><p>“You will be the first Prime Minister to serve from the Lords since the Marquess of Salisbury,” Charles said, but it was just a mild observation. “I have no objections;” Narcissa kept the wax hot on her desk, and the King used his seal to seal the agreement formally.</p><p>“Your Majesty,” Narcissa rose, and curtsied. “My thanks.”</p><p>“You have acted to protect my House,” His Majesty answered, looking at her with weary eyes, reflecting all he had endured in the past six years. “I will reward you as we have agreed for securing the Government’s commitment to the Monarchy.” In truth, he simply didn’t have a choice, and the way Narcissa had arranged it, nobody else did, either.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>An hour later, they were in the building’s main conference room in a repurposed lecture hall. It was serviceable for the circumstances, with flags and tapestries and a very nice lectern, taking full advantage of the imposing and solid style of the 1970s Soviet architecture. And so it was that one of the most important developments in the recent constitutional history of Britain would be taking place inside of the former Architecture Institute of Astana.</p><p>Hermione stood at attention with the other officers present, while the King arrived, in uniform. Narcissa, conversely, was in her finest wizarding robes. She was introduced by the herald as, “Lady Narcissa Malfoy-Black, acknowledged as a peer by dint…” The herald took some time to explain the lineage, since, of course, it had not exactly been public knowledge for many centuries. Since the House of Lords was not sitting, the Ceremonial Induction could not be held. King Charles would reward Narcissa by personal investiture.</p><p>Hermione shivered as a new standard was unfurled. It considered of the arms of the Houses of Black and Malfoy, quartered. <em> Toujours Pur/Sanctimonia Vincet Semper. </em>Always Pure / Purity Will Always Conquer. That was a very essence which condemned all that she was and all that she ever was, entirely by dint of her birth. The Garter King of Arms bid Narcissa to approach.</p><p>Another of the heralds—it was decided by mutual agreement of the King and Narcissa beforehand to forego the involvement of any of the Ministers—read the Letters Patent.</p><p>
  <strong>“Done at Astana, by dint of Extraterritoriality with the Confederation of Independent States, May 20<sup>th</sup>, 2003.</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong> The King has been pleased by letters patent under the Great Seal, to declare His Royal Will and pleasure that the Duchy of Lancaster, and the County Palatine heretofore appertaining to the Duchy, shall be separated from the Sovereign, and granted to Lady Narcissa Malfoy-Black, and the title of Duke of Lancaster shall be given its fourth creation hereditary to Lady Narcissa, and by Special Remainder, to be passed firstly to her Son, Draco Malfoy, and henceforth through her sisters and their lines by order of birth, including all rights to the Estates of the Duchy and the Administration of the powers Palatine of the County; and that the Arms of the creation of the Duchy of Lancaster shall be the Arms of the House Black and the House Malfoy quartered; and further to declare His will and pleasure that the Earl Marshal of England, or His Deputy for the time being, do cause the said letters patent to be recorded in His Majesty's College of Arms to the end that the officers of arms, and all others, may take due notice thereof.” </strong>
</p><p>Narcissa placed her hands between the King's, and made the oath, and the forms of loyalty were observed and the Letters Patent presented. Having been invested with the symbols of the Duchy to which her maternal family had called home for centuries, in the shadows, and that she now held openly, Narcissa rose before the King—the most powerful Peer of the Realm in centuries. Charles had paid for her commitment to the Crown at a fine price, though not so fine as losing it all.</p><p>Hermione shivered. The world had changed. Once, the idea of the King voluntarily once again, as in medieval times, separate certain aspects of Royal Authority to a feudal vassal was <em> unthinkable </em>in the modern age. But the modern age was dead. Half the world lived in medieval squalor. In fact, if this was the price that Narcissa had named, it might just be worth it for the sake of keeping Britain from being torn asunder.</p><p>Twice.</p><p>They would have to regain the realm no matter what, after all.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0044"><h2>44. Bringing the Storm</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Bringing the Storm.</b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The Army which was formed along the Norwegian frontier to the north at the Kjolen Mountains, consisted of six Russian divisions, five Swedish divisions, three Finnish divisions, and now, six British divisions. To the south, one each Russian, Finnish, and Danish divisions garrisoned liberated Zealand. That formed the full fighting strength, except for rear-area security troops, in the Scandinavian theatre of operations. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The British troops were on the far south of the line, and would attack through Ostfold, near the fortress and town of Fredrikstad. Their objective was Oslo, from the South and the East. The Russian Armies would attack from the East and North; the Swedes and Finns would operate in the north as part of the general push. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>It was a set-piece battle, of course. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>The Morsmordre knew they were coming, but exactly where the main blow was to land was being intentionally obscured. That was a part of the Russian operational art. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione had been at Bellatrix’s headquarters at the town of Ed, inside of the Swedish frontier and at the foot of Lake </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Stora Le, a seventy kilometre long narrow lake straddling the border, now heavily patrolled by small boats carried overland for the Russian Navy. The sun of July had dispelled </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>the cold, and </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>on what was the last day of the month, it </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>was a pleasant </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>summer </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>by any measure. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Tomorrow it would be August—and also war.</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> She had her collar open, and was </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>enjoying the breeze that came on as the sun set to the west of the lake, while drinking bitter Arnica flower tisane, a Swedish custom, and trying to unwind; she had woken up at 0400 and worked non-stop through the day.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>The lake was fantastically unspoilt, though there were some remnants of floating docks, abandoned years ago, and some sunken motor-boats, but most had been put up on shore by their owners in hope of a future where they might be run again. The lake, though, was for the moment entirely in the hands of the military. It was much too close to the front for anything else.</p><p>Still, over the town of Ed flew the blue-and-yellow of the Swedish Flag. At the headquarters building, the Union Jack flew alongside of Bellatrix’s personal standard, of the arms of House Black. Narcissa might now be the Duchess of Lancaster, a fact which still astonished Hermione, a little, but Bellatrix personally was the head of the House Black, and the two standards were different.</p><p>The mindless reverie hid the fact that in forty-eight hours they would be in action. The past two months, deploying six divisions from the rear, deep in Russia, to Norway, establishing the zones of operation and the appropriate chains of command for the two widely separated elements of the Army, all of it had been a blur. Now the blur came to a culmination.</p><p>She was still thankful that before her mind turned to darker thoughts, Bellatrix stepped out of the headquarters building—a rustic hotel on the lakeshore--and walked down toward the shore of the lake. Reds and oranges and purples in lush shades reflected over calm waters.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The dark witch looked like a speck of night silhouetted by them. She was beautiful in all the ways the sunset wasn’t, though </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>she couldn’t match the sunset for its lush colours. Bellatrix was all black and white, and her beauty was stark, too big for life, too sexy to stand. Hermione hid her grin over her tisane. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She wanted Bellatrix to be her project. She wanted to redeem her. She couldn’t help herself, she wasn’t going to help herself. That ship had sailed. The only question was if Bellatrix truly wanted what she did. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>And that might just be a lot of wishful thinking. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bella turned toward her, and though they were at least sixty metres apart, Hermione flushed that she had been found out, and staring right toward her, too. But the older woman just shook her head in bemusement, and then turned back to look north, up the length of the narrow lake. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione took it for an invitation to approach her side. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>The older woman remained standing silently, looking up the lake.</p><p>“Does combat bother you, Bellatrix?”</p><p>“Not really. It’s one of those mendacious little muggle lies that people never love war,” Bellatrix deigned to her answer her. “A way to convince yourself you’re not quite so savage as you’re afraid you really are. Well, you are. It’s just the nature of things. I <em>am </em>afraid for Draco, though.”</p><p>He had insisted on remaining on the front. Hermione nodded, and swallowed. She’d be worried for Draco too… And for a lot of other people. “So you don’t worry about others, or war, but you do worry about family?”</p><p>“What else is there to worry about?” Bellatrix laughed.</p><p>“Do you worry about me?”</p><p>Bella stopped laughing and looked hard at Hermione. “Nice try,” she chuckled, softly, but now the words didn’t lead to a real answer, one way or another.</p><p>“You don’t have to throw me down on a bed and ravish me if you care about me,” Hermione let herself get a little bit huffy about it. She really did crave a sign of compassion from Bellatrix.</p><p>Instead, Bellatrix laughed, and her eyes glinted, and she turned back to face Hermione. “Actually, <em>maybe I do,</em>” she replied with her voice as sultry as it had ever been.</p><p>Little electric shocks seemed to run up the younger witch’s spine. <em>Oh Merlin, she just had to say that. </em></p><p>Bellatrix smiled brilliantly, snapped her fingers, and pointed at Hermione in bemusement, before spinning away and walking back to her headquarters. “Tomorrow is Lughnasadh. It’s hardly the first harvest of this war, but I find it fortuitous nonetheless.”</p><p>“Do you follow the old ways?” Hermione hastened after her. She’d certainly never discussed metaphysics with Bellatrix before, and the woman seemed in a playful good mood. Perhaps it was just to set Hermione on edge, since tomorrow would be so bloody, and here was Bellatrix, unconcerned by it, and living her lack of concern.</p><p>“Do you think that the Christian God would be kind to me?” Bella laughed, now tinged with darkness, and wiped at her sleeve. “I think it’s best that I don’t meet his afterlife.”</p><p>“I think we’re safe from such an afterlife. I don’t believe in an Almighty, myself.”</p><p>“<span><span>I wish I had your optimism.” Bellatrix paused at the door to the hotel. “But perhaps not your unending need to share your banal muggle rationalism with everyone. Granger, even the modern Wizarding world is rather banal. The past had more in it than just Koschei.”</span></span></p><p>“Well, I hope Luna and Larissa find it.” Hermione stood frozen in that moment, where she didn’t know if she wanted to follow and stay close, or tear herself away from Bellatrix.</p><p>“<span><span>They </span></span><em><span>will.” </span></em><span><span>Bella looked firm, and behind them, the sun was slipping lower, the last rays were vanishing below the hills. “Now go to bed. I need you fresh for tomorrow. Sleep with the sun.”</span></span></p><p>“I… Alright. Thank you, General.” Hermione raised her hand to salute, but Bellatrix had turned away. Of course, going to bed was not as easy as it had been once, and so, stepping back into the evening’s gathering gloom, she reached for her pack of belomors.</p><p>The sergeant of her protection squad stepped out of the shadows. It was enough to prompt Hermione to go for her wand, the cigarette still frozen between her lips, before she laughed. “Quiet as ever, Vasya. Want one?”</p><p>“Sure.” He took the stick, and Hermione lit it for him from the tip of her wand, since it was already out. The mosquitoes were surging around them too, and she then banished them with another spell, <em>Separatum Culicidae, </em>which was, from the perspective of human comfort and health, one of the most wonderful spells ever created.</p><p>“I knew there was a reason I stayed around you, boss,” Vasya chuckled, while the mosquitoes were left buzzing futilely some feet away.</p><p>Hermione grinned confidently and lowered the cigarette, held between two fingers. The flickering of the cigarettes were like glow-bugs in the dark.</p><p>Her friend and sergeant had some concern on his face, though, as they both looked to the north, where the silence and peace of a summer night would never come, for there was already a dull roar of artillery. “I’m not sure staying at her side is the best idea ever.”</p><p>“I’m not sure either.” Hermione lifted the cigarette back to her lips. “But, it’s too late to turn back.”</p><p>How much both of them meant by what they had said, neither wanted to explain. It was best that way. Hermione finished her cigarette, and followed Bellatrix inside.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Larissa and Luna found themselves </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>near Baiji, in Iraq, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>where their search had carried them. In the meantime, Voldemort’s armies continued to slog deeper into Iraq, to the point that Larissa was getting rather concerned about the timeliness of her mission. Perhaps the Morsmordre would soon enough be on the Zagros. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>Shattered libraries were put to the best use they could be, by archivists of many ministries. Larissa had poured over satellite images for hours and hours and hours herself. Luna had tried some divination, and also read histories. It was the last which had produced a result, and in an unexpected location which brought them closer to the front, and the shattered shell of the massive, nuked-out oil refinery.</p><p>“It will be here, the divination makes it clear,” Luna said, ignoring the clicking of the radiation detectors. She was looking at the river.</p><p>It was all a very strange tale. In the 1840s, a British archaeologist named William Kennett Loftus had tried to get support from The British Museum to conduct archaeological digs in the old Assyrian Empire. Being refused, he had created his own Assyrian Expedition Fund and, on receiving support from the French, proposed a 50/50 split in artefacts with the Louvre. This attracted enormous opposition from the infamous Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, who was the chief official of the British East India Company in Baghdad.</p><p>Nobody quite knew what happened, but in 1855 as the antiquities Loftus had recovered were being transferred downriver by boat on the Tigris, Arab bandits had attacked the barges, and several were lost, sinking down into the mud of the Tigris with their goods. Copies of the cuneiform and inscriptions had revealed the story of Musasir to begin with; but not all had impressions made before they were lost.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Luna had determined that the secret was, just perhaps, buried under the radioactive, oil contaminated mud which sat across from the ruined refinery, here just south of the narrowing of the Tigris where it squeezed through a crevice in the long ridge running </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>northwest to southeast, just south</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> of al-Fathah. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Luna wasn’t worried about it, but Larissa closed her eyes as the sun beat down, and for a moment allowed herself that flash of real fear, that </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>she would never have a family. Not like she had ever found anyone to want to start one with, but the witch to crack the secret of magically manipulating radiation had not yet been born, apparently. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The guys were counting on her. Helicopter pilots, NBC troops. She was the one from MinKol. Larissa finished pulling on her full protective suit, and tipped a salute to Luna. With no more ado, she walked down until the ruined waters of the river lapped on her boots. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Luna waved and retreated with the others.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>At the moment, the situation was calm, the radiation readings close to the shore were fine. Larissa was about to </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>make </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>them </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>fine. She </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>took her wand, and concentrated. “</span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Aquae Impoundus</span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>!” Swinging her wand through carefully controlled motions, in arcs wider and wider, she drove the water of the Tigris back. Not severing the flow of the river, but channelling it. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>She drove the water into the western third of the channel, and then </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>held </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>it there, while the river quickly sped up to a raging torrent in the part of the channel that she permitted to it. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then she turned to the mud, and with a series of sweeping spells, drove it back from the bottom. The tension </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>in the air it could be spread with a trowel. The officers of the military units present were treating this as tensely as battle, they didn’t know exactly what it was for but they knew it was enormously important to pull them off of their normal duties and send them here. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>They knew how much risk their men would be in, too, as the detectors started to chitter angrily. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Bottom mud </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>in a major river was a great point at which radioactive materials would be concentrated after a nuclear war. Larissa was standing in, though she used her wand to keep shoving it away as fast as she could, but churned up and exposed to the atmosphere, it made the radiation levels rapidly increase above even the loosely defined “safe” </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>levels</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> of a post-war world. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>But the men crew still, now, as they saw the shattered remains of the shallow-draft wooden barges, cleaned of the silt which had buried them for a hundred and fifty years. Luna’s divination had been right on the mark. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Of course it had. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>Larissa lowered her wand, and turned quickly away. She didn’t look back, she didn’t slow down, she didn’t pause. Instead, she walked as fast as she could, in a measured and purposeful way, until she reached the decon line. With a moment’s pause, as it would be for any witch, she placed her wand in a holder on the outside. First they hosed down her NBC gear with a mixture of soap and water, until it was clean to inspection. Then she stripped naked inside of the first part of the decon tent. Each step felt like a brusque descent into the strange hell of her nuclear world.</span>
  </span>
</p><p><span><span>The NBC gear would be re-used, there was no way to avoid that, but only after cleaning and cooling, the rest was disposed. In the meanwhile, Luna came over, and cast a spell to clean the wand; that would at least guarantee there were no particulates on it. For the next step, inside, Larissa stepped through the showers which sprayed her down with decontaminating chemicals soaked into water, just to be safe. After that, she stepped through a rad detector to mark her exposure limit. At the end of the decon line, she was given a new uniform, dressed briskly—modesty was long gone for the sake of the war—and was helped straight out to one of the armoured vehicles, so she could be shielded by the vehicle’s armour from any additional high radiation levels. </span></span><span><span>Someone thought to press a cup of tea to her hands as she settled in, and she got the beef and barley from a field ration pack, in a mess tin. </span></span><span><span>Someone dropped off her dried wand a few minutes later.</span></span> <span><span>It had been as little time as possible, but the clicking of the detectors had still been inexorable. </span></span></p><p>Outside, her magic remained empowered. That was the point, of course, the better part of a battalion of men in gear like her own was now tasked with shovelling away the remaining mud, scraping artefacts clear, and hauling them back up to the decon line, where they would be decontaminated exactly like people, which would also clean them for inspection. Certainly, some of the most fragile examples would be lost, but they were looking for cuneiform tablets, not for anything else, and this was war. The destruction of human cultural heritage around the world had already been immense, and this couldn’t be helped.</p><p>Luna, with a bubble-headed charm cast, to conserve gear, walked back and forth slowly at the end of the decontamination line. Larissa saw her when she got bored and looked through the vehicle’s sighting periscope. Her job, of course, was to inspect the artefacts until she found the one they were looking for. If they did.</p><p>The men would be working in teams, to try and keep their exposure low. It would still be high. Larissa slumped down against the side of the APC, and let herself drift off to sleep for a nap. The mental exhaustion was such that not even the tea kept her awake. They would wake her when they needed her again.</p><p>A banging on the hatch of metal against metal alerted her, and she staggered out, to see the Colonel of the force.</p><p>“Junior Councillor, pull back the river. We’ve got it.”</p><p>She trusted him, of course. Larissa quickly cast the negating spells, and the water rushed back into the channel with a terrible roar, churning up and burying the piles of mud, contaminating the river downstream, but protecting the troops who were now being decontaminated and urgently needed their exposure to end, immediately. It destroyed the rest of the archaeological site, but that, too, could not be helped. Such was the pity of war.</p><p>“It’s done, Sir,” she answered and leaned back against one of the wheels with relief.</p><p>“Then I’ll see to my men.” Who knew exactly what he thought of her, or the situation. Only time would tell how many radiation sickness cases they had, and whether or not she was one of them. But there would certainly be some.</p><p>Luna came over, holding the tablet reverently.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Thousands of wizards and witches had led the combat. They were brought forward to positions with assault companies that had been selected, and specially armed, to support storming the defensive positions of the Morsmordre. Along the entire front, there were thousands of artillery pieces, and the lighter Grad and Uragan rocket launchers, and dozens of Smerch launchers and launchers for SRBMs—short-range ballistic missiles, manufactured since the war began to make up for the loss of aeroplanes and the continuous need for more artillery.</p><p>A short “hurricane” bombardment had opened the attack, just enough to stun the enemy. This had been executed in conjunction with Smerch rocket attacks and SRBMs being directed at rear areas and staging areas, to prevent the rapid movement of the defenders’ reinforcements into position. The sound had been more intense than anything Hermione had experienced yet. For fifteen minutes the sky had opened, and the cacophony of Hell had consumed the world. Inside, outside, shielded by mountains, shielded by hills, it didn’t matter, the sound was everywhere, so intense that it seemed it could drive one mad, aurally.</p><p>She had never seen Bellatrix more beatific. The woman seemed naturally attuned to the raging sound around her, like a drug. A curled grin on her lips, her collar hanging open, hair cascading down—the messages flew in a flurry, and she used the telecaster—now shorn of its wicked, controlling functions by removal from the pensieve—to communicate in real time with a series of subordinate commanders and focus on specific areas on the line with greater ease and convenience than any drone could have given her.</p><p>Bella issued orders based on the changing sounds—the intensifying roar of an urgently requested supporting barrage, the fading sounds of enemy artillery falling off as it began to retreat—at an almost instinctual level even before the data was in, spinning the gears of the bronze artefact like she was truly the Eye of the Battlefield.</p><p>She worked Hermione and the rest of her staff to the bone implementing it, and that was just in the first hours, after the sound of the initial bombardment had faded away. Then the magic-users had gone in, the wizards and witches who led the assault companies. They had fallen on the positions of the enemy, ideally stunned, with as much stealth as possible. Then with every spell they could muster, calling forward simple <em>Bombardas, </em>murderous <em>Sectumsempra, </em>and even fiendfyre, they had gone into the Morsmordre lines, killing, blasting, disrupting the enemy until they found their opposites—local superiority in wizards.</p><p>
  <em>That’s </em>
  <span>what Bella had done. Concentrate them at a particular point on the line. Take the risk. Remove the main advantage of the Morsmordre for the specific area of the attack. Hit hard and fast—open a gap. Then disperse them to defend against the chevauchees that the Morsmordre wizards in other sectors would inevitable launch in response. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>With every sound from the artillery to the damned field phones ringing off the hook, radios crackling, brevity codes in the air, the shouts of people… The whirring of the gears on the telecaster, and an occasional laugh from Bellatrix between shouts of her brilliant voice, reaching out, keening—all of it, loud and demanding and needy—flowed around her, as Hermione tried to distil it, constantly, into the information her commander needed, and translate her orders from operational genius into practical, unit by unit tactical directives. She wrote and wrote, broke pencil after pencil, and flipped through so many radio channels she forgot </span>
  <span>how she could even remember that many codes. </span>
</p><p>That’s what it meant to advance, to attack. Removed from the front now, in the life of a staff officer, she had seen enough of the other side of this experience to not want to let those men down. So Hermione worked herself to the bone, and pushed directives down into plans, and then worked harder still. The day was a blur of conversations, noises, cigarettes, caffeine, and chocolate and crackers, consumed on the fly, too busy to sit down for a hot meal or indeed any real meal at all.</p><p>And Bellatrix sat, with a pile of reports in front of her that waxed and waned depending on how energetic she was in dealing with situations. The maps spread out on tables lower down in the converted dining hall; her tea steaming next to her. Her legs kicked up, crossed, with indolent confidence—but her orders were anything but. She saw a brief, read it, tossed it away with a flick of her wand—a dozen of them were outright floating in the air in front of her at any given time—and then went to the telecaster, summoned up a particular officer to speak over it, or just viewed a position from above, as magic crackled through it.</p><p>The telecaster was definitely more important to her command style than the radios were, and the several times the power of her magic flared enough to burn them out, despite how valuable electronics had become, they were simply replaced with nary a word of caution to Bellatrix. If she broke through, but at the price of a hundred radios to her command staff, it would be worth it, and she knew that already. The majority of her staff had still served her before, and nobody could expect to ask Bellatrix limit herself for muggle equipment; worse, it really would be a disadvantage toward the spinning and the blue-white lighting crackling over the gears and epicycles of the strange, ancient device.</p><p>So another radio broke under Hermione at a stray band of magic from Bella’s work, at once manic and lazy (covering everything, but caring nothing for how it was done), and she just tossed it to the side. “Replacement, on the double!”</p><p>For a brief moment, Hermione thought Bella turned and flashed her a smile at that.</p><p>And the offensive moved on, pushing over the rugged terrain on the border between Sweden and Norway, smashing through forests, crossing over lakes, fronting mountains. Dislodging the enemy, seizing lengths of trenches and berms. Bridges destroyed, people killed—but at T+6 hrs, they had met most of their objectives, and by T+18 they were rolling forward on several converging roads toward Oslo. The raw intensity of the situation began to catch up with her by then, and the fatigue rolled across her in waves. But Bella’s mania seemed to carry her through, and with her, the whole Army. She was a true force of nature in this moment, and her name never seemed more suitable.</p><p>Hermione yawned, and reached for another cigarette. As long as Bellatrix herself did not rest, she could not bring herself to be rotated out. Others were going down, eighteen hours had bled into twenty, and they were punishing for the mental acuity of the staff officers, but she mustered herself—every late night studying, and every desperate battle she’d had before—and carried on, until the two women were very nearly the last left, and even Generals Dodson and Diaz had retired for short naps, and the ‘second string’ staff was handling things as the Army pressed forward, representing one force of four attacking the Oslo pocket on a broad front. The tiredness made her bones ache, but the belomor gave her the strength to carry on a bit more.</p><p>Hermione knew she was going to lose, and have to retire before Bella did. But the race was on, there were men’s lives to save, openings to be exploited, gaps to wedge into clear roads to Oslo. And she wanted to be the last to tap out at Bellatrix’s side.</p><p>“Granger, don’t be a dolt, take a damned nap,” that voice breezed between spins of the telecaster.</p><p>Or, maybe, she had just been waiting to hear that.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0045"><h2>45. Ceremonies of Hope & War</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><b>Ceremonies of </b> <b>Hope &amp; War</b></p><p> </p><p>Oslo had groaned under the dominion of Voldemort’s government—the wizards aligned to him, the conscription of troops to be ensorcelled into soldiers for the war in the east—for five years. Before that, the marshalling yards and large docks to the east of downtown had been hit by two nuclear weapons, and another three had chewed into the mass of industrial districts and additional marshalling yards around Alna. These weapons strikes had collectively led to the deaths of one million people in Oslo.</p><p>With the prevailing winds pushing the nuclear fallout to the west and the areas west of the old down, including the suburbs like Holmenkollen, Sogn and Ullern, having not been hit, the University of Oslo and the Skoytemuseet area – the Oslo Museum—had become the centre of the new city, where 500,000 people had still lived, even with evacuations and proscriptions, under the domain of Voldemort.</p><p>On 3 August 2003, they finally tasted freedom. As the British columns had converged at the town of Ski, a small resistance resistance force had joined them, launching an attack near Ytre Enebakk to clear the right flank of the northern column. Bellatrix proved obliging enough—perhaps the charming manners of the infiltrated MinKol wizard leading them had done the trick—to let these Norwegians lead their own capitol’s liberation parade. The radiation hotspots by the harbour had been cleaned up by the Morsmordre and it was there that they marched in, while the Russian troops, converging from the north, doffed their NBC protective suits, went through decon, and were quickly given dress uniforms for the parade.</p><p>In fact, when IV Corps had broken through an armoured brigade defending around Elvestad, and opened the path for their main advance, the Morsmordre had offered very little resistance in continuing to defend Oslo. The rugged mountains and expansive heights as well as the long fjords and large lakes to the west of Oslo would make penetration into the Telemark and the rest of the lower third of Norway difficult even after taking Oslo, and after the nuclear attacks, the city was no longer quite the priority it might have otherwise been. Intelligence suggested the occupation government had evacuated to Bergen.</p><p>Regardless of the exact details, they had liberated Oslo, so they were having a parade. They couldn’t help the dead, but they could, and just had, given the half a million people who still lived here back their lives, their liberty, their futures.</p><p>It was something to feel good about. The bands played, the troops marched in full dress uniform, and Hermione stood behind Bellatrix on the reviewing stand. King Harald was on the other side of her, looking tired but prideful. In fact, Hermione had overheard that he had advanced cancer from his exposure to nuclear radiation in the initial attacks on Oslo which he had survived, and would not live much longer—but in this war, a man who lived long enough to liberate his capital had died well and could count on the sentiment of his people being <em> Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori</em>, which was more than could be said for the vast bulk of humanity. The same rumours also said he had gone out of the palace to personally organise rescue missions into the debris; but Hermione was too cynical to know if she should give it a wit of consideration, or if it was all, surely, monarchist hagiography to help preserve the Crown. <em> Does it even matter, really? Let people believe what they want to believe. </em>The little inquisitive rationalist in her first years at Hogwarts, trying to understand all the rules of the world of magic, would have never thought that, but here she was.</p><p>And of course, the King hadn’t really liberated his country. Though the resistance forces of native Norwegians had been invaluable, it had been Russian arms—and the Black Guards. To his credit, King Harald had been a perfect gentleman to Bellatrix from the moment they had met a few days ago. Bellatrix in turn had managed to actually get her collar buttoned and properly adjusted for the parade.</p><p>What did he think? Hermione was low-ranking enough to be ignored in the small chatter between the officers and dignitaries, as the tanks and rocket launchers and trucks and marching ranks thundered past, to British and Norwegian and Russian military music. The Life-Guards Preobrazhensky Regiment certainly looked amazing as it crossed in front of them, goose-stepping sharply with heads turned to the right to present themselves in full dress uniform with their rifles, arms and legs moving like a well oiled machine, thousands of men like a single organism, as their march wafted through the district of Frogner. <em>“We are Known to Turks and Swedes…!” </em></p><p>Ironically, there were Swedish units also in the parade.</p><p>Really, it was a whole lot of irony. There stood the King, next to the woman who had been the principle lieutenant, the right arm, of the man whose plan for war had dispossessed him of his Kingdom, sent him into exile, and likely given him fatal cancer. He had greeted her courteously, and they stood together as victors on the same reviewing stand, in the city which had been nuked multiple times by the regime Bellatrix had served until less than a year before.</p><p>But of course the dirtier secret was that the nuclear weapons themselves had been Russian; of course they had been. Voldemort’s plan, his magical agents, had guaranteed a nuclear exchange between all the powers. The Russian commander on the other side of King Harald represented a country which had responded to the provocation of the initial nuclear launch, and the false information it had received, by nonetheless launching nuclear weapons targeted to kill a million Norwegians as ‘collateral damage’.</p><p>They now marched through the city as liberators, to receive the cheers of a still-starving population. If King Harald thought differently about the situation in his heart-of-hearts, he had certainly learned long ago, as a King, to hide it well. For those of his people who survived, Hermione did not doubt he was doing the right thing. The sun shined down, and the King’s bright expression seemed to dispel the idea that his heart was heavy.</p><p>Perhaps he avoided it by keeping his mind on a future, when Norway was peaceful and prosperous and free, and these starving people were old and happy, and had all the food they wanted.</p><p>Once, Hermione had thought that was all she was fighting for. That peaceful, prosperous future when they defeated Voldemort. She didn’t expect to see it herself, but she imagined dying for it was good enough, when everything else in life had turned bitter and hopeless.</p><p>The sun in Bellatrix’s hair was lovely. All the ties in the world couldn’t contain it. Hermione faltered for a moment, just from seeing that dark halo, and wondered indeed what she was fighting for anymore. Was the war a matter of right and wrong for her? Her mind flickered back to Pansy Parkinson and she shuddered. Perhaps it had become a <em>beau geste </em>to the woman she had become utterly infatuated with.</p><p>It was a sobering thought, but Hermione didn’t have the slightest idea of where to go with it. She was trapped in an even greater power than war—love—and her self-awareness did her no good; she remained trapped.</p><p>The parade finished, the King said something or another to Bellatrix, and the elder witch turned back toward her as they descended from the reviewing stand. “Come on, Colonel Granger.”</p><p>“Of course, General,” Hermione answered formally, and followed her back toward the car.</p><p>“I want you to attach yourself to the joint force pushing northwest toward Oppland. Find Draco and keep him out of trouble. This is almost over and if anything happens to him, it will crush Narcissa.”</p><p>“...Bella…?”</p><p>“I <em>Trust You,</em>” the Black scion asked with a flash of frustration. “The objective of the thrust is Ålesund, to cut the northern front of the Morsmordre off and prevent them from retreating with the others to Bergen and Stavanger. They say Voldemort’s Navy is organising an evacuation, and even the Americans might be involved.”</p><p>“They haven’t done anything for the entire war!” Hermione exclaimed, her protest about being separated from Bella forgotten in a moment.</p><p>“Yes, well, that means Voldemort is more and more frustrated with them. MAGUSA needs to stop sitting on the fence soon, the only question is what side they come down on. Evacuating some troops from Norway is hardly a direct confrontation, though we will engage them if the opportunity permits. So, you’ll go? My Nephew--” she paused, “Though you are the <em>First Born </em>of your own line—he has come to value your acquaintanceship I think, and he needs you. He was not made for this life, but he has managed to handle it admirably nonetheless. Get him out, Granger, we both need Narcissa fully focused on the political affairs and not worrying about her son.”</p><p>“I… Alright, Bella. I’ll get him out.”</p><p>“A car will take you to the Maridalsvannet, a brigade taskforce is mustering on the northern shore.” She tipped a lazy salute, and turned away.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Larissa’s feeling of triumph had not lasted long. About six hours later, she had started throwing up. She had taken about a hundred and fifty rads. For three days, they had forced her to bedrest (and Luna had provided potion after potion, to try and counterattack the effects of the radiation on her body). Though the dose sounded ominous and the nausea and vomiting was unpleasant, as well as the overwhelming sense of fatigue, in fact, by the fourth day, she was feeling well enough to board a helicopter to meet with the rest of the team for the final search, based on the description of a ceremonial procession from Lake Van to Musasir.</p><p>Luna’s translation had given them a position south-southwest of Mahabad in Iran, near Sardasht, West Azerbaijan province. The city had been subjected to a chemical weapons attack by Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war; now the governments of those two countries, such as they were, fought on the same side. The mission was too important to trust anyone else; after landing, Larissa took the tea pressed to her, and watched the group of vehicles her team was assembling with help from the local Basij. They were the one force of the Revolutionary Guard not dismantled—to useful to have a popular mobilisation militia—by the new government after the nuclear attacks had led to the collapse of the Islamic Republic.</p><p>It was not the first time that Larissa had suffered radiation exposure, though it was the largest amount in a single dose. Sometimes, she wondered if her fine aristocratic disposition was all entirely natural, or if it was partly from her body being weakened by the poison in the atmosphere all around. Now she felt pale more than she was, but the weakness was more real than the sense of withering that feeling of intense nausea and weakness had left her with.</p><p>She had insisted that she could come. Now, she had to live up to it. A second cup of tea, then. Boiled to a deep reddish-brown and mixed with rose petals, it was served off a Samovar just like in Russia, and the bitterness was like a medicine to her body.</p><p>Luna came back over as the men finished assembling the vehicle convoy. “Are you sure you’re quite all right, Councillor? I rather think you have wrackspurts, they must like radiation very much… I did rather think there were some around. Not many positive thoughts these days, they must be really spreading.”</p><p>“...<em>A third cup of tea,</em>” Larissa said to the woman in the headscarf, the wife of the local gendarmerie commander, who she had been sitting with. Her mangled Farsi was good enough for the circumstances.</p><p>Luna just smiled. “Well, what do you think Musasir will look like, Larissa Sergeivna?”</p><p>“If it’s an intact city under an Unplottable spell? Like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” Larissa shrugged. “If it’s buried? We might spend months digging to find a few fragments which lead the way to the Lake of Anahit. If that.”</p><p>Luna smiled brightly, almost infectiously so. “I think we’ll find a city,” she confided. “They’re ready for us.”</p><p>Larissa finished the last of her tea, and got up, thanking the woman before following Luna. While Luna sometimes digressed into plain insanity, for the most part, Larissa trusted her instincts and sense of timing.</p><p>A few minutes later, they were rattling down dusty gravel roads through the dry terrain of the Zagros mountains, at high speed. They descended toward the river valley to the east, with Luna in the lead vehicle, guiding the convoy with the tablets floating in the air in front of her, to protect them from damage, jostled by the road, as much as for convenience. Larissa, as the nominal commander, sat in the back, and looked out at grass pock-marked with short shrubs, and banded rock running down to seasonal streams, exposed to the air. It seemed like once that this land, thousands of years ago, by the population which had been here and the ancient stories, had been much more fertile.</p><p>They approached the rugged, banded terrain of a narrow, shadowed defile to the south and east of the city. It was where the sun crossed two rocky outcroppings to create the dim, shadowy form of a plinth that Luna immediately ordered a halt to the column. It seemed she had found her spot.</p><p>A minute later she was there, helping Larissa out. “Alright. So, we’re here. We’re either digging, or casting magic, but first we’re casting magic, because I don’t want to dig,” Larissa muttered, looking back down toward the river to the east, the heights of the defile to the west. “Actually, magic either way; let’s be honest. No sane person would build a city here. The terrain itself isn’t natural. Just like Koschei’s palace.”</p><p>“Yes, exactly,” Luna agreed enthusiastically. “Now, we need to think about how they would have chosen to secure their city. This was in ancient times, and…”</p><p>“Things mattered then, blood and religion, as they don’t now, to the wizarding world.”</p><p>Luna nodded and flashed her a secretive smile. “But you are of the Black Court, right?”</p><p>“Yes. Keep the men back for now, I don’t want to offend their Islamic sensibilities in their homeland. Just have our own protection details up with me, please.”</p><p>“Oh, I think I can arrange it.” She waved as she turned away.</p><p>Larissa scrambled up through roots and dirt and rock on the slope, until she got to a place where the sun shone around her, straight past to rock formations below. Then she got down on her knees. Larissa loved languages, and had put real effort into learning them over the years; of course she hadn’t learned Urartian, but Armenian would do well enough. “<em>Haldi, </em>Lord. God of War. A warrior needs your help in a time of trouble, right now…” Magic was fickle, clever, playful. Before this war, many wizards had something of a reputation for a disposition toward merriment, though Larissa and her family had never shown it. But there was a little gleam in her eye, and a comfortable, confiding way, she talked to the God.</p><p>Then she sat, and drew a bow out of a charmed satchel at her side, and nocked an arrow; she’d seen a rabbit, right enough, after she’d prayed (she wouldn’t tell her parents she’d taken up praying to pagan Gods sometimes, there was no need to upset them). With a <em>twang </em>in the air, she had her humble sacrifice, hopefully good enough. The altar was dug by hand, rock collected and formed into a square, and she started the fire with her field kit and let the meat burn. Plunging her face into the smoke, she grabbed for her wand, and began to cast a complex, weaving spell. It did not have a name in Latin. It was something Aiman had taught to her. At the last moment, she cast mushrooms into the fire, the kind from the steppe and Siberian wood which no sane person ate, but which shamans used. “<em>Vat</em><em>alar</em><em>i jho</em><em>l</em><em>i.</em>” The words came as a culmination of extensive preparation. Everything she had just done had been necessary. They would work, too, only where there was a spell this powerful. This magic was meant to build off remnant magic--the permanent spellwork--of long dead shamanry. Nothing else would do, no other way had enough power to access the shadows of the past. The spells were tracing her back in time to the very eyes of the spellcaster. With a flick of the little blade she carried at her belt, now drawn into left hand, she slashed her forehead, and the smoke roiled across blood.</p><p>Larissa was torn away from this world and into a world of dreams. Ahead, then, where two branches of the ridge cleft apart from each other, was actually an open space, a substantial dry valley, well-defended by rock walls. The temple could be clearly seen at the heights beyond it. Her form was, she was dimly aware, different, or perhaps she was just ghostly; but moving in that procession, she was just one of the mass of faithful--no, more than that, she was a shaman, and in a position of respect.</p><p>The houses were stone and wood, built two or three stories, and densely pressed together. There was a palace of the local Lord, and others of notables; the market in the heart of the city, and the temples, to lesser deities, here were overshadowed by the immense shrine to Haldi, the famous Hall of Weapons. They were carrying on a processional with the weapons of the faith. At the head, in an ancient custom of the Near East of great antiquity, were eunuchs with long braided hair, dressed in the clothes of priestesses, and dancing with swords. All the powerful magic of ancient times required blood—the Enarees of the Scythians of the Steppe had been their equivalent--but, also, Larissa couldn’t help but imagine there not being a connection to the strange story of the Yezidi. She was dimly aware that, for a moment, she was of a similar nature to them, for so had a magic-user of the power and place of the one who had hidden the city been in the past.</p><p>The procession carried on, with the smoke of the fires hanging heavy and low over the city, and the chanting of the crowds. Larissa was carried along naturally into the chanting, swirling a long scarf wrapped around her shoulders and dancing with the masses until the skirt she wore spun. The laughter of men and women and children filled the air, and the raised weapons of the priests in the processional glinted through a sky of smoke and sun. The hills were verdant and green around them, and it would go on forever, with the God’s blessing.</p><p>All around, the walls of the city were of massy fitted stone, and immense monolithic stones supported the approach ramps to the temple as well, which the procession winded, to a massive brazen offering cauldron which hung over the fires roaring before the Holy of Holies of the God, the immense statue of Haldi, in a hall filled with arms of every type--bronze, iron and even gold and other more exotic things, all finely polished. Finally she could see what the God looked like, the God whose appearance was unknown to modern historiography, but as in the limited iconography, was surrounded by a ring of fire, stoked from the votive offerings below, through bronze grates in the floor of the Holy-of-Holies. Now, the crowds ululated and screamed, and the priests readied the sacrifice, and with a great sword, leapt before the bull and finished it in a stroke, risking being gored as a part of the rite. The crowd erupted as the blood seared to smoke and steam and ash in the blazing cauldron below, and the bull was plunged into the flames. They laughed and tore at old garments and condemned them to the fire, and sacrificed little things. Larissa pressed closer, and cut herself with a blade, and let the blood splash down onto Haldi’s altar. Her world grew hazy and dim, and it seemed like an enormously powerful force grabbed at her.</p><p>When she awoke, the sun was low in the horizon. She was still in place in front of her little stone altar with the burnt remains of the rabbit upon it. She felt incredibly tired, deeply in pain, very weak. Luna was there, and pressed hot tea to her. “Drink this before water. We don’t want you making yourself sick.”</p><p>“Thank you.” She could feel the wicked headache from dehydration, and drank the tea in small sips. With the defile already getting cool with the lack of the sun, and how dehydrated her body was, the warmth was desperately welcome. Of course, she was completely confused by the fact that Luna was now wearing a fedora with a feather in it in addition to her uniform. But it was Luna. “Is it… Day…?”</p><p>“Yes, it’s the same day. You went for quite a journey, didn’t you, Larissa…?” Luna asked more informally. “I mean, I can feel something really quite beautiful. Did you find out anything?”</p><p>“I… Did,” Larissa agreed hoarsely. “Water, now?”</p><p>She was handed her canteen, and drank greedily, even though the water was warm. “Luna, please,…”</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>“I want you to send half a squad to look for a gazelle or deer and bring it as soon as they can.”</p><p>“Oh?”</p><p>“You don’t go to church without leaving an offering,” Larissa muttered. She saw that her wrist was bandaged. She had only cut herself on her forehead to initiate the rite, and that told her all that she needed. But Luna, though she had bandaged the cuts, did not ask about them.</p><p>Luna poured out more tea for her, and then went to talk to the squads. The second half of one descended, so there were four men there, to help Luna in getting Larissa up, and help her across the steep slope toward the valley. The valley which was just a rock wall in the cleft of two ridges.</p><p>Larissa got to her knees, easier than relying on the men to keep her up anyway, and then knelt slowly until she could kiss the dirt. Rising, the sun was just vanishing below the horizon. There would be no better time. She reached for her wand. In her weakened state, it seemed like the spell was squeezing out her soul.</p><p>But reality flickered for a moment in front of them, and revealed the city of Musasir. Roofs had fallen in, and some buildings partially collapsed, but it was intact to a terrifying extent, as only magical protection could provide. It had been abandoned long ago, certainly, but now—there it was.</p><p>Larissa remembered everyone she had seen, alive and in the fullness of life, and began to cry. It had not gone on forever.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>It was by Grua along the Rv4 at the junction with the E16 that they encountered enemy resistance, with the brigade Hermione was posted with (comprising units of the Coldstream Guards and the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment) occupying the west side of the line, in banded terrain of rugged hills filled with small lakes. The Russians were on the right, pushing on toward the town of Roa, up the road during the march onwards toward Ålesund and the sea. Ahead of them were open plains bounded by long lakes with multiple routes—a perfect place for them to outflank any defence and the terrain would prevent any kind of reinforcements to the enemy. It was a last good chance to stop them, and try the Morsmordre did.</p><p>Close to the shores of a tiny half-circle lake, <em>Bombarda </em>spells knocked over trees, as Hermione and her protection squad threw themselves down. As part of her objective of finding Draco, Hermione was part of the team trying to establish initial contact with the Russian division advancing toward Roa.</p><p>The sun overhead seemed to offer no protection. The flank of a force, seeking to make contact with its allies against the desire of the enemy, was one of the most dangerous places to be, but Hermione was thankful for the combat nonetheless.</p><p>The overgrown patch of cut-down trees marking what would have been the building site of a house loomed in front of them. She ignored it. It was certainly swept by enemy fire. Troops, and more wizards and witches, were coming up fast from the west. Their mortars were setting up. All around them the continuous rumble of artillery and mortars and the crack of rifles in the woods mingled with the sound of spells and of the fires burning through the woods from their effect, which would have no pity on the wounded.</p><p>Bullets tore into wood around her, crackling through the trees. She was forced down lower and lower by the fire, as the smoke wafted overhead. Every so often with a slash of her wand she’d call forth a quick <em>Protego </em>and cover herself and her men as they moved closer to the front. Targets were designated by firing smoke grenades from under-barrel launchers on the rifles. Suddenly with the falling of explosive bombs, the battery of 120mm heavy mortars was in action. They were reinforced, from the rear, by a much heavier battery of SP 240mm mortars. The next stand of forest in front of them, separated by 150 metres of open ground, exploded into tongues of flame.</p><p>But as it did, Hermione could see some of the mortar bombs actually stop and ricochet in thin air. Someone else, an enemy wizard, was definitely using <em>Protego </em>there. They were close in to the shore, and it gave Hermione an idea. The lake, as were many mountain lakes in Norway, looked quite deep. She turned back as the fire slackened with the enemy driven to ground by the power of the mortars giving fire, making it safe for her to rise. “Hey Vasya, come on! Get me a company together, we’re going to walk under the lake and take them in the flank!”</p><p>“On it, boss!” He had a cheerful grin. It was the kind of glorious insanity you signed up to participate in when you were in a wizarding protection squad. They did attract the best – the hungriest fighting men, who would do anything to win.</p><p>And that is exactly what Hermione did, manipulating and blending the Bubble-headed charm and tunnel spells on the fly to let an entire team <em>move under the water of the lake, </em>creating a tunnel of air for them. The fact that the trees plunged down to the shore, with no beach to speak of, made it perfect, because their entry to the water and the creation of the temporary tunnel with her spellwork was concealed from the enemy.</p><p>Of course, it meant slogging through the soft silty bottom of the lake, coming up and beyond to their boots. Then a few errant mortar bombs slammed into the lake and detonated, and Hermione’s eyes widened as she jinked her wand in absolute desperation, to reinforce the charms on the walls of the tunnel of air. The pressure waves slapped against it and pressed the strength of her spells and innate magic to the limit as, in flashes of white through the water, filled with cavitation bubbles, they thundered against the tunnel, and deafened them all. The ears of a few men bled, and they were all forced to their knees in the muck and mud for the contraction of the tunnel.</p><p>But Hermione held it together, and they slugged on through the mud with a greater sense of haste. And then at the end of the tunnel, there was no time for subtly, there was no time to emerge from the water patiently. She let the tunnel collapse behind them, as she caused the water around them to explode outwards, in a massive wave that drenched the shore and slammed into the broken and battered trees from the mortar bombardment. It was such a huge, enormous commotion that it immediately provided a signal to the commanders of the batteries to cease fire. It knocked over and slammed down enemy soldiers into trees and rocks and killed someone, and washed others back into the lake.</p><p>And out of it exploded eighty men with guns firing from the hip, throwing grenades and rushing inland across water pouring back down into the lake, as Hermione slung every spell she could think of into the confused and disordered enemy ranks. They carried through on the assault as fast as they could, suppressing the enemy position and throwing them back in disorder. The rest of the battalion now attacked overland alongside the lake, with the enemy fire gone, the charge across the beaten ground could be executed with few casualties.</p><p>From the moment they exploded out of the lake, Hermione’s attack gained the battalion another two hundred metres of ground, so that they had, in all, pressed forward nearly four hundred metres with limited casualties. Combat vehicles were coming up behind them to reinforce the attack.</p><p>Then the enemy proved, as they always did, that even for Voldemort, there served brave men.</p><p>A single battery of towed 155’s had been set up in the open field beyond, about seven hundred metres further east from their position. They had been unable to get into action yet. Another battery commander would have, in the circumstances, gotten his guns limbered up and retreated.</p><p>Whomever was over there, seven hundred metres away, decided to cover the retreating troops, decided to cover his comrades. Whatever he thought of Voldemort or the cause he served was immaterial. With his guns exposed to witches and mortars on the open field, he was in murderous danger. He responded to it by having his gunners lay and fire their guns, levelled to 0 degrees elevation, across their open sights. The FH70s put three rounds down range each, in fifteen seconds.</p><p>Hermione had just enough presence of mind to snap an unvocalised <em>Protego </em>from her wand as she saw the muzzle-flash of the cannon. Then the world around her exploded. Bodies fell like leaves in autumn. The power of the concussion shock seemed like it could almost be sensed, no, it could be sensed, battering her body.</p><p>She felt like she should have dropped dead. But as the hammering of the guns slowed from the exhaustion of the men—twelve rounds a minute was an impossible task for very long with heavy 155mm guns—she realised that she was resting on an ancient massive stone, set there so long and partially buried. In it were runes; it was a marker of a Vé, in Old English, a wēoh, an ancient open-air shrine. The world around her had slowed down into a strange feeling of detachment, the same kind of detachment she felt in the ceremony of the parade.</p><p>Here then was an ancient religious site, probably never deconsecrated, just abandoned with the coming of Christendom. Here, the ancient Gods of the land had been worshipped. Did they still watch their people? Did they frown with anger at the murderous despoilment of the nuclear weapons, as so many magical beings had been turned against Voldemort when he struck out to ‘cull the herd’? Did they secretly empower her and the entire Army to be victorious, because the Gods still favoured the descendants of those who worshipped them? Did they linger, even when they were forgotten?</p><p>She pressed down to the ground as another burst of shells swept the position of her troops. But she could see the men, pressed prone to the torn up ground, alive around her. Whatever it was, they were here, they were lucky. Hermione gripped her wand and prepared to press that luck. If they had been saved, it was only to attack the enemy; they could not take it for granted, they could not shelter in beaten land forever, they would have to attack. “<em>LANCS, WITH ME!” </em></p><p>She brushed her fingers gently over the runes, and then, with her wand in hand, casting <em>Protego </em>even as she rose, Hermione stood up into the fire.</p><p>Hermione timed the next shield perfectly as one of the gunners leapt back, pulling the lanyard as gracefully as a dancer, and sent a 155mm shell hammering to within metres of her body before it spun wildly away, to detonate three hundred metres to the south. Another gun was ready to fire.</p><p>Then the crew dropped with a furious fusillade of spells flung in their direction. They did not come from Hermione or her troops. Hope flaring through her, she went over onto the attack, targeting another one of the crews that was reloading.</p><p>The gunners died serving their guns.</p><p>Crossing the field, Hermione could see the Russian troops which had overcome the battery from the south and east. They had ‘linked up’.</p><p>And the blonde figure in fatigues who led them was absolutely unmistakable. Once, Hermione would have loathed a random encounter with him, but that Hermione and that Draco were long, long ago. Instead, she flung herself into his arms and gave her former bully the tightest hug she could. “Comrade, your aunt’s been looking for you!”</p><p>For all that they had just been through, she still got a blush out of him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes, in no particular order:<br/>1. The practice of eunuch servants of the Gods was well established in the ancient Near East, most notably where they were dispatched to save Inanna from Ereshkigal in the Descent of Inanna. Notably they often bore arms despite being extremely feminine. Whether or not they could be described as transgender is a matter of considerable dispute in historiography.<br/>2. The heavy 240mm mortar is the 2S4 Tyulpan; the 120mm is the 2S12 Sani.<br/>3. 150 rad, or about 1.5 Gray, is by no means a lethal dose of radiation. It will only kill about 5% of those exposed and take around 6 weeks to do so. The other 95% of exposure victims fully recover.<br/>4. "Lancs", common abbreviation for the men of the Lancaster Regiments.<br/>5. Here, Larissa is able to open the path to Musasir because, through her Shamanistic dreamtime experience of participating in worship and sacrifice to the God, she became a congregant of the temple. This is part of the unique, Central Asian Shamanistic influenced magic of the blood rites of the Black Court of Koldovstoretz.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0046"><h2>46. Modern Times</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Modern Times</b>
</p><p> </p><p>They had walked through the ruins of the city, with most of those present having a state of reverential awe. They were not really <em> ruins, </em>not in the conventional sense of Bronze Age architecture. Wooden supported roofs had mostly managed to lose their strength and collapse (though not all, because those that did not rot, proved quite resilient). The city was remarkably intact. Even the architecture of Lyonesse, the small island between the Scillies and mainland Britain, was not nearly so old, and Luna, let alone Larissa, had never had the chance to visit that Unplottable Island, anyway.</p><p>Because of that look, like the buildings had been only abandoned for a few decades, not thousands of years, it was uncomfortably still alive, for all except Larissa, who had so vividly seen it when it was <em>really </em>alive. They approached up the processional way that she had danced along what seemed like only hours before, it had been hours for her, but thousands of years, too. Some of the soldiers carried a deer they had shot. Others had some scraps of wood and a butane burner. It would be enough.</p><p>Larissa leaned on another, to help her walk despite her fatigue, as they approached the great temple. Luna, in her fedora, was dashing about, using spells to record images to a notebook, and then carrying on to another place, looking for signs of writing in the buildings, until at last they reached the temple, where the statue of the God remained. On the walls, the frescoes and the bas-reliefs told the stories of Haldi, and they told other stories, too.</p><p>Prominent among them was a great mountain, surmounted by a winged figure. Larissa shivered, and felt instantly that it was what they were looking for, though it was as useless as all the other references—until it was deciphered.</p><p>Quietly, in a daze, she walked around the paving stones, and let Luna study the bas-reliefs and the writing chiselled into the stone, and start a search for any cuneiform tablets. Larissa, instead, found the brazen altar, and spent a while just staring at it. In her eagerness to help her nation and gain victory, she had, without a single thought, committed herself to something grave and serious. But wasn’t that the essence of a warrior, and wasn’t that perhaps exactly why some mystical power had linked her to a God of Arms and War? She had not hesitated, no matter the risk, and no matter the cost.</p><p>Just like Hermione had not hesitated for even a single second before committing herself to support Bellatrix Black’s ‘strategic turn’. She had committed herself to enormous risks and an uncertain outcome, and now she had paid a price, a different kind of price entirely, but a price all the same, and in that they were friends sharing the same fate.</p><p>Larissa had plagued herself with an immeasurable feeling of being trapped between two times, of being connected to a civilisation and people thousands of years dead. Of having made an offering to a God, unworshipped in thousands of years, all for the sake of information, to put them one step closer to defeating Voldemort. <em>For I have no doubt now that it is one step closer to defeating Voldemort. </em></p><p>Hermione? The price she had paid for her split-second decision to turn the war in Russia on its head was simple—she had fallen in love with the most hated woman in the world.</p><p>Larissa would be the only member of the life these people lived. The archaeologists would never experience it quite like she did. And they would share the consequences of their choices for as long as they lived. In Larissa’s case, she couldn’t give in to despair, and if that meant marking herself as an infamous dark witch and pagan, so be it. She dropped to her knees and drew her dagger, to draw blood against her palm, uncaring of the exhaustion and wounds she had already inflicted on herself. The men muttered, and some turned away and crossed themselves, but when she gave the order – “Light it up, boys!” – they obeyed nonetheless.</p><p>Behind her, Luna stood smiling, and quietly approached only when it was all over. “I think that was beautiful, Larissa.” The first ritual to Haldi in uncounted centuries.</p><p>“Thank you,” her commander answered with unshed tears at the power of the moment, as the brazier burned hot with the charred scent of a sacrificial offering once more. “Do you have something?”</p><p>Luna uncomplicatedly took her hat off and knelt next to Larissa, her voice dropping. “I do. The translation will take days or longer, but it’s clearly a full description of the World-Mountain, including the processional route.”</p><p>“Then it was worth it. No regrets.”</p><p>“I’ve always been blessed that way,” Luna smiled without guile, “and I hope you and Hermione feel the same. There’s nothing wrong with following your convictions. People only get turned ‘round when they don’t. Quite the tragedy, really.”</p><p>“What would you say of the Dark Lord, then?” Larissa shook her head, and looked up to Haldi, as if the God might also provide some insight.</p><p>“Ruled by his fears. Exactly the same tragedy.”</p><p>“Well, nobody will ever say that about us.”</p><p>“Indeed not! You’d be a perfect Gryffindor, if you’d been British.” She winked, and rose again. “I’ll put together the report for MinKol, Larissa. <em>Get some sleep. </em>I am sure the God will protect you in his halls. He hasn’t had worshippers in a long time!”</p><p>
  <em>But I wonder what Koschei was? </em>
</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Draco, of course, refused to leave the front again. When Hermione pressed him on it, he gave only a sheepish shrug and said, “my men are counting on me, until the bitter end.”</p><p>Sometimes, for all he had been a perfect twat back in school, she thought he was a better person than she was now. The legacy of being scared and ashamed and driven to do evil because of it—and still being scared, but driven by an even greater sense of shame, the need for redemption—had put him in the place of a hero. He was clearly deeply uncomfortable with it. But unlike when he tried to serve Voldemort, it was not necessary to hurt others, but only to die, to be brave here and avoid the shame of a lack of bravery. So he had mustered the state of mind necessary to be a hero, and hero he was again, in the land which had given him his favourite proverb, that the hero was the man who could hang on for one second longer.</p><p>Draco was still hanging on.</p><p>So Hermione had stayed by his side, night and day, for the next six days, as the combined armies smashed their way to the coast at Ålesund, and cut off the bulk of the remaining Morsmordre forces in the north, pinned by the Swedish and Finnish troops, unable to break off contact, and then gutted from behind by the Russians and the Black Guards. That left only the pocket in the southwest, and the Morsmordre had clearly abandoned any hope of a counterattack; as Bellatrix had expected, the troops were being evacuated at Bergen and Stavanger.</p><p>Fighting and killing was still going on, but at a strategic level, the final chapter of the Scandinavian Theatre of Operations had been written. The Scandinavian Peninsula and the associated outlying islands had been liberated, and the Allies had gained a position on the North Sea, only a few hundred kilometres across the ocean from Britain, Voldemort’s base of power.</p><p>Six divisions of the Morsmordre surrendered with a ceremony held at the village of Folldal in the rugged western mountains, cut off and isolated in pockets. Now the combined forces were pressing against those remaining, lest the evacuation proceed without any harassment at all.</p><p>When they had entered the town that morning without facing any resistance, both Hermione and Draco had awkwardly realised that an entire theatre of operations had been closed, in part by their efforts. Then they had been drawn into an awkward ceremony at the Tollbugata along the old inner harbour where the Mayor of the town insisted on giving Hermione as the ranking allied officer a Goose, and the keys to the city.</p><p>Ceremonies, indeed.</p><p>The end result of them all, from Hermione’s point of view, was that she was walking through a picturesque Norwegian port. In uniform, in the middle of a War. Next to Draco. While holding a live goose.</p><p>“Is life really this stupid all of the time?” Hermione groused as she headed back to the unit, trying to find somewhere to <em>put. the. goose. </em></p><p>Then she turned a corner and walked into Bellatrix. Hermione fell back on her butt on the pavement, and the goose, with angry squawking, escaped and started to run through the street. Bellatrix stared at her, and then at Draco.</p><p>“’Mione, what were you doing carrying a goose?”</p><p>“Uhm… Bella, what are you doing here?”</p><p>“...Aunt Bella, Hermione’s on a first-name basis with you?”</p><p>Bella pointed accusingly at Draco. “Not a word, young man. And the answer to that question is NO. I am not on a first name basis with Her-Granger.”</p><p>Hermione, sitting on the pavement, was grinning, though. So casually, Bellatrix had called her a kind nickname instead of by her surname. It really <em>had </em>mattered. Even Draco was grinning a little.</p><p>“Your mother was incredibly worried about you, Draco,” Bellatrix said with a frown. “You kept ignoring her entreaties to return from the front.”</p><p>“I needed to stay with my men and see out the campaign,” Draco answered with a hapless gesture. “It’s not pleasant, but I was here, and I wasn’t going to leave until it was done.”</p><p>“Well, you’re coming back with me to headquarters. I had sent <em>Granger </em>to get you, not to help you attack Ålesund.”</p><p>“We encountered no resistance,” Hermione sighed.</p><p>“Well, before that!” Bella looked back to Hermione for a moment and frowned, before turning to Draco. “So I apparated away from my own headquarters to sort this out myself. And you <em>will </em>come with me, I’ve had orders cut to make you one of the staff liaison personnel.”</p><p>“Doesn’t that mean I’d be reporting to Hermione?”</p><p>“Yes, it does, and if you have the slightest bit of discomfort about that… Well, go fetch the Goose.”</p><p>“Aunt Bella?” Draco stared.</p><p>“Go fetch the Goose. Come on, you’re my favourite nephew… You’re just getting the damned goose.”</p><p>Draco sighed and shook his head, turning away to try and find the goose in the street.</p><p>With a bemused expression, Bella extended her hand to help Hermione up. “I <em>am </em>sorry about that. It was entirely accidental.”</p><p>“Well, thank you for the hand.” Hermione smiled, and standing near Bella, her fantasies seemed real.</p><p>“Ålesund is an interesting city,” Bellatrix remarked, and actually took her hand, and started to walk. For a moment, Hermione was too shocked to even know what to do, but she just kind of stumbled along, and then walked automatically. “I came here when I was young, researching a bit of family history. It was very different in the early seventies, of course. So many channels of water everywhere, it’s divided into two islands and a peninsula, really… All the wildlife. Still some of that, at least.” Her expression turned dark. “I still can’t believe we ended up being the ones who did what I originally wanted to stop.”</p><p>“You’ve said that before,” Hermione remarked. They shifted, and the moment of connection, physically, was lost, but Hermione still walked close enough for their sleeves to brush, along the embankment. “Be honest with me, Bella, did you really mean it?”</p><p>“Of course I did!” She exclaimed. “Thérèse showed me the muggle world, and I was by turns fascinated and horrified. Oh, there were amazing things in it, I won’t dispute that. But nuclear weapons? Pollution? The acid rains, the rivers catching on fire? Our magic is linked to the natural world, Hermione. Back then, it seemed like it was <em>dying. </em>There would be no place for magic in a world which had only cities, where people were fed ‘soylent green’ inside of bubbles. Do you really think that I joined the Knights of Walpurgis to be <em>evil</em>? As you silly Gryffindors would say, <em>I thought I was going to be the good guy. </em>Can I say the exact moment when I stopped caring about that? Merlin, no, I can’t. I won’t try to speculate. I did stop caring. I will be honest about that. It was all blood supremacy and power and conquest and domination for its own sake—for us—by the end of the First Wizarding War. But I thought, when I first went to those meetings of the Knights of Walpurgis, that, that I was going to save the world and save magic from the dirty muggles and mudbloods. When I came here in ‘70, it was … When I thought my new-found membership in the Knights of Walpurgis, when I thought my service to the Dark Lord… Would remake the world for <em>good.</em> Oh yes, we’d get rid of all you mudbloods, Hermione. But I could apparate to a river choked with garbage and dead fish and turned brown with the arsenic-impregnated soot from a coal power plant, and feel, really feel, that it was the good, righteous, proper thing to do, and seizing control of the Muggles was the only way to stop them. So I followed the Dark Lord’s plans willingly.”</p><p>Hermione looked out at the fishing vessels which had kept Ålesund from starving, rusting at their piers. Of course, it all left a lingering question, even as she decided to ignore the slurs; they just didn’t seem to carry the same weight, speaking of the past, when Bella seemed almost honest and willing to use her name. “And what did it feel like when they decided to let the nukes fly?”</p><p>“The penultimate worst day of my life.”</p><p>“What was the worst? Azkaban?”</p><p>“Merlin, no,” Bellatrix laughed bitterly. “I knew I was going there for months before the sentence was handed down. The day Thérèse died.”</p><p>“What..”</p><p>“I don’t want to talk about it, Hermione. No, let me tell you about Ålesund. You see, once, a long time ago, in that water out there,” she gestured toward the open sea through the rock-islands beyond, “one of the greatest works of magic in the world was wrought.”</p><p>“Was it?” Hermione paused. “I haven’t read anything about it.”</p><p>“Binns and all the stupid textbooks they give you First Borns are completely useless. Magic has been advanced and sophisticated, and magical society has been advanced and sophisticated, for much longer than Muggles have been knocking rocks together,” Bellatrix smirked. “You see, the Storegga Slide, which severed Britain from mainland Europe, was the work of a witch, defending her people.”</p><p>Hermione shivered. “Oh my God. You really mean that, don’t you?”</p><p>“Oh yes. I dreamed of it often when I was in Azkaban, it seemed sometimes like the only happy dream I could have.”</p><p>“...I’d hardly call the tens of thousands it must have killed and the enormous coastal devastation ‘happy’, Bella.”</p><p>“Suit yourself, I thought it was. It certainly doesn’t poison the land like radiation.” She shrugged. “Well, it is what it is.”</p><p>The younger witch looked out to the quiet, dark sea. Before she could speak again, Draco came back, holding the goose.</p><p>“Alright then!” Bellatrix clapped her hands. “We will go to headquarters and sort things out, and then return to Oslo. Come on.”</p><p>“...Aunt Bella, what am I going to do with <em>The Goose</em>?”</p><p>But Bella was already walking away, and Hermione was grinning as the two followed her, because now, it was Draco carrying the goose.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>By five days later, Hermione had settled into something of a routine in Oslo. The officers of the liberating army were quartered in intact homes, and the Morsmordre had at least restored the water and sewer service, and the electricity sometimes operated, though that was a much lower priority for a wizarding occupational Army, and most limited to important sites where it was needed for industrial and commercial activity.</p><p>Because the supply of tea and coffee to Voldemort’s Europe had been limited, the people of Norway had to make do with smoked and roasted Yerba Mate instead of coffee, with chicory from the United States added to improve the bitterness and provide both caffeine from the Mate and a reliable taste like coffee from the Chicory (though only with the Mate being heavily roasted and smoked). Though this supply had now also been cut off, for the moment, it was plentiful in stock, and cheap. Hermione felt rather guilty about having anything else in the circumstances, particularly around others, and so made a point of drinking this concoction, called Ersatz-Kaffee throughout western Europe (the Germans had named it first), rather than show off the better rations of the officers.</p><p>There was a café which served it on her walking route to work. She would stop there for a neat little bowl of coarse oat porridge and a cup of the Ersatz-Kaffee, whitened with <em>something </em>which was probably as much recycled cardboard as it was food. The <em>ritual, </em>the routine, of simply eating in a café instead of the Mess, or instead of eating the reasonably good food which could certainly be supplied at Bellatrix’s headquarters, felt grounding to her, and maybe a little defiant of the way a Front Army’s headquarters lived in comparison to the front line.</p><p>That morning her usual table was occupied, as some life returned to the city, so she sat on the other side of the patio. Eating her quick little meal and forcing down the bitter brew (and thinking that maybe this was a terrible idea and she should let herself indulge, for only the sixth time in six days), she saw a small record shop across the road. It looked like it was still open.</p><p>A thought seized her. She knew that Bellatrix was acquainted with all of Al Stewart’s earlier discography, even some from the early part of the First Wizarding War, but by the end, the war was much too intense, and she was too close to Voldemort and the other Death Eaters, to plausibly have kept up with new releases. And she <em>certainly </em>had never heard any of his material released after she was arrested and sentenced to Azkaban. Finishing her food and Ersatz-kaffee, she put an occupation token down on the table, and with a quick glance in both directions (no fate could be more absurd at this point than being hit by a car, she supposed), crossed the street to the store.</p><p>Opening the door, the inside was dusty and unkempt. The owner was lean, but most people in Oslo were now, with a scraggly beard, as unkempt as his shop, and threadbare clothes repaired several times. Still, he had kept it open—perhaps the shop had been a life’s dream. “Do you have any of Al Stewart’s albums?” She asked, hoping he spoke English at all.</p><p>“Ah… Al? A Russian officer, asking me for Al Stewart?” he managed a lazy grin. “Do you like <em>Roads to Moscow</em>?”</p><p>Hermione indulged him – “Yes, it’s one of the few songs in English which tells the story of the last war decently. But I’m looking for the new albums.”</p><p>“We have them,” he said agreeably, and let her back down to a dark set of shelves. She happily browsed the records, then, and saw them, all the ones she was looking for: <em>24 Carrots, Russians &amp; Americans, Last Days of the Century, </em>and of course, <em>Between the Wars. </em>The live albums <em>Indian Summer, Rhymes in Rooms, </em>and <em>Famous Last Words </em>were there, too.</p><p>Hermione sucked in her breath and gleefully took them all. She paid in occupation tokens and twice-overprinted paper monies, the Norwegian kroner stamped first with the Morsmordre, and now stamped again with the symbol of the occupation authorities. The owner, happy for the size of the order, bundled them all up for her, in paper and drawstring, and she carried them under her arm like a briefing folio as she made to the headquarters, located just off of Fridtjof Nansen vei.</p><p>She resolved to give them to Bellatrix in the evening, when their work was done, and not before. It just seemed right, even though it left her bubbling with anticipation throughout the whole day, and barely able to focus on the details of how they would reestablish the civilian government, and support King Harald calling new elections, and ultimately, the final positions for the cantonments of the troops along the coast in the south and the west.</p><p>Intellectually, she knew that it was just as important as any other task. But it seemed mundane compared to a direct confrontation with Voldemort—and this she had once known—and shirking, compared to combat outright, and this she also knew. Nonetheless, she was an intellectual, and she knew her role was in fact very important.</p><p>But it gave too much time for thinking.</p><p>When her shift was over and she had submitted her summaries and handed over the roster of duties to the Night Action Officer, Hermione was finally free of the tasks, and also the idle thoughts. Instead, she was shaking like a leaf in a storm, feeling entirely unclear over whether or not it was anticipation or fear.</p><p>It was really too much. She lit up a cigarette, and stepped out on the balcony to see the summer sun setting. Only when she had steadied herself by drawing it down with a couple of hard drags, did she turn back inside. Then she picked up her package, wrapped in string and brown paper, and made her way for the rooms converted into a residence. The guards let her through, she was always on the short list for access to Bellatrix’s quarters.</p><p>A knock on the door, that was all, with baited breath.</p><p>Bella opened it almost immediately, her uniform blouse hanging open like a vest. Hermione involuntarily sucked in her breath, and forced her eyes away from Bella’s undershirt.</p><p>“Colonel Granger?” The older woman’s face betrayed bemusement at Hermione’s response, but then she stepped back and waved. “Do come in.” She sauntered back over to the couch, and Hermione stepped in and closed the door behind her.</p><p>“I-I have something for you, Bella.”</p><p>“Oh?” Her curiosity piqued, Bella looked expectant.</p><p>“Oh yes,” Hermione answered, and stepped forward, presenting the brown paper sheaf.</p><p>“Well, are you going to tell me what it is?”</p><p>“Do open it,” the younger witch grinned. “But it is a gift.”</p><p>“Hmf.” She tore off the paper—of course she did—and then sucked in her breath. Bella flipped through each record in turn, staring at the covers with awe and delight and a little bit of humour. “Oh isn’t he so precious,” she mocked <em>24 Carrots </em>gently. She flipped through the lists of songs on the back, and browsed through the albums, before reaching up with a flick of her wand to guide a bottle of wine and two glasses over; another sent the cork popping up into the ceiling like it was champaign, even though it was only a Georgian red.</p><p>“<em>Bad Reputation,</em>” she mused, reading the name of the first song on the B-side of <em>The Last Days of the Century. </em>With no more ado, she put vinyl to the needle on the massive old Soviet record player she’d dragged along with her on campaign, sitting on the end table. One hand bare and as white as her face, the other, gloved to hide the gold of her artificial arm, but she looked more alive in that moment than she had in the entire time that Hermione had seen her.</p><p>She poured out the wine into two glasses, and tugged at Hermione. “You’re being quiet,” was offered with a tease.</p><p>“I’m waiting to see what you’ll think…”</p><p>“You’re being <em>especially </em>quiet for you, especially considering your reputation as a smart-alec. Drink your wine.”</p><p>Hermione shook her head, and raised her glass; but the song came on, and in a moment, they were both transported away. It was <em> too fitting, </em>really. It put Bella in a bemused and playful mood.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> You've got a bad reputation </em>
</p><p>
  <em> All over the street </em>
</p><p>
  <em> There's some indication </em>
</p><p>
  <em> You've been indiscreet; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Oh I know you can turn on the charm </em>
</p><p>
  <em> When you feel so inclined </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Whatever I do </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I can't get you out of my mind; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> It's a sad situation </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I'm coming apart </em>
</p><p>
  <em> A clear invitation </em>
</p><p>
  <em> For trouble to start; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> If I knew what it was that you did </em>
</p><p>
  <em> It's so hard to define </em>
</p><p>
  <em> But whatever it is </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I can't get you out of my mind; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Maybe I'm seeing </em>
</p><p>
  <em> What I want to see </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Trying to make you </em>
</p><p>
  <em> What you'll never be; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Perhaps it's just the simple fact </em>
</p><p>
  <em> You only want the things that you can't have; </em>
</p><p><em> Oh </em> <em> I suppose somebody broke your trust </em></p><p>
  <em> Cause now I see you kicking up the dust </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I wouldn't be at all surprised </em>
</p><p>
  <em> If some of it got in my eyes; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> You've got a bad reputation </em>
</p><p>
  <em> They're telling me so; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I've got a strong motivation </em>
</p><p>
  <em> To get up and go </em>
</p><p>
  <em> If I knew what it was that you did </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I'd just leave you behind; </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Whatever it is </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I can't get you out of my mind </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I suppose this will come to a close </em>
</p><p>
  <em> It's just a matter of time; </em>
</p><p><em> Whatever </em> <em>I do, </em></p><p>
  <em> I can't get you out of my mind </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Can't get you out of my mind... </em>
</p><p> </p><p>Hermione was shivering by the end of the song, the lyrics teasing her mind with the situation she’d found herself in. And then the smaller woman next to her—and it was so hard to remember that Bella was smaller, sometimes!--so deftly reached up, and pulled her in, and kissed her. It was abrupt, and Hermione’s glass barely reached the end-table safely, with a small, soft splash of wine onto the dusky stained cherry-wood.</p><p>With her brown eyes wide, Bella wrapped her hands through Hermione’s kinky, frizzy hair, and pulled her down against herself, until she was nestled into the crook of the couch with Hermione over her. Their mouths were open, Bella’s tongue was needy and demanding and exploring deeply into Hermione’s mouth, duelling and playing, totally in control even when she was under and engulfed by another.</p><p>The meeting with Bella’s plump and lush lips and quick tongue that half seemed to have a mind of its own—it was like nothing else. Their lovemaking before had been desperate passion, wild need, hopelessness and loneliness turned into lust.</p><p>This felt—dare Hermione even think it—<em> romantic. </em></p><p>Finally it ended, but the expression on Bella’s face was so confident and content and pleased that Hermione didn’t really feel like the kiss had ended; the emotions behind it had certainly not.</p><p>Bella grinned. “Thank you for the albums, ‘Mione. There might be something in addition to my daughter to live for, after all.” She gently flexed her fingers in Hermione’s hair—and kissed her again.</p><p>Though they didn’t sleep with each other that night, Hermione felt something had irrevocably changed nonetheless, and more meaningfully than during their moments of lust the winter before. It seemed like love, and it terrified her and thrilled her all at once.</p><p>After all, she very much <em> had </em>fallen for someone with a ‘Bad Reputation’...</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>In the end, I can't resist; I have to have a chapter with a song for a theme. But there's no finer artist than Al Stewart to bring Bella and Hermione together, and no more fitting song for their relationship!</p><p>Likewise, as an aside, the presentation of a Goose on the surrender/liberation of a city to the commander of the Army or a national leader is a not unheard of tradition in European culture, along with the keys of the city, and it has certain customary significance as the start of a new phase of life.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0047"><h2>47. Lake Van</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Lake Van</b>
</p><p> </p><p>When fate or fortune intervened, Hermione was left with little time to process what had just passed between her and Bella, and certainly not any more time to explore life in an occupation Army with Bella. They were both summoned to travel as quickly as possible to Yerevan—and after a brief exchange, Narcissa had allowed Bella to take Draco, apparently considering he’d be safer around his aunt.</p><p>Luna and Larissa had found something about the search for the Lake of Anahit, or the true mythological Ararat, or whatever it was; though what the discovery had been, was not explained to Bella or Hermione. The younger witch could see the tension in the woman she loved. Bella wanted the Lake, that much was clear, and Hermione thought she wanted her body whole—for both vain reasons, and for a sense of starting anew.</p><p>A Tu-144 was sent, and the two flew over the vast expanses of interior Russia, at speed. They flew from the Arctic, to the Caucasus, avoiding the enemy lines and the threat of interception, in a grand arc. Even this magically modified aeroplane still needed fuel, and at the technical stop, in Lugansk, Hermione could clearly see the bombed out, nuked, fought-over city as just a pile of ruins. Even the airport had been wrecked, and Air Force fuel trucks and a portable control tower were there to serve combat operations.</p><p>Once airborne again, Bella began to pace down the aisle of the aeroplane in the back compartment. In the end, Hermione got up and walked to her side. “It won’t be much longer, Bella. You have a bed, do you..” She gestured back to it, in the private compartment. Draco was stuck forward with the more junior aides.</p><p>“Do you think I can sleep like this?” Bellatrix shook her head and looked at the black-gloved hand, the leather vanishing up under her uniform sleeve to hide her artificial arm from sight. “Do you think they enchanted it to kill me like Pettigrew’s did?” She asked, abruptly, from nowhere.</p><p>“Oh <em>God </em>no,” Hermione shook her head vigorously. “Why would you even think that, and now, of all times? Lara isn’t that kind of person, and nor would any of her friends be.”</p><p>Bellatrix bit at her lip and put her hands on Hermione’s shoulders for a moment—the one in the black glove, metal, clenching <em>firmly. </em>“Because I want this over with.”</p><p>“I… I understand, but I don’t want you to necessarily get your hopes up.”</p><p>“Not a word, Granger,” Bellatrix seethed, and turned around to find somewhere to sit, with her boots kicked up on another seat, <em>away </em>from Hermione.</p><p>With a sigh, the young British witch turned around and went back to her book. <em>Three steps forward, two steps back. </em>But it was still progress. And she trusted Lara and Luna, she really did. She was certain they had found something useful. The real question was if it would really lure Voldemort in like Nymphadora wanted.</p><p>But they’d just have to try.</p><p>The thought drifted away into a vague feeling of irritation. Mostly with herself. <em>I’ve become one of ‘those people’, </em>Hermione sighed to herself. She wanted a cigarette on the aeroplane, and she couldn’t have one. It wasn’t a good flight.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>In Yerevan, Nymphadora had been waiting for them, with Ginny. Hermione had embraced her warmly, despite a trace of discomfort at having her so close to Bellatrix. The exchange between her and Draco was coldly polite. That was the entire group, then, with Luna and Larissa at their final destination, which Nymphadora informed them was Van, in Turkey. There was an intact portkey connection, and the rest of the trip took only a moment. They exited through the basement of an old building, which Nymphadora idly informed them had once been the foundation of an Armenian church, before it had been knocked down and replaced with a storefront; but some Armenian wizards defiantly remained in Turkey, and hid themselves.</p><p>Hermione shook her head. The legacy of human warfare and violence was never far away, that much was clear. The sun was still very hot at this time of year, though in the north, fall was threatening thanks to the abbreviated summers. Here, of course, was another matter, though in the high mountains like this eastern Anatolia could get cold at night no matter what, and some of the highest peaks around them had prominent snow-caps. The breeze off the lake—and Lake Van was immense, from this perspective—helped immensely.</p><p>Nymphadora led them to the local Army headquarters. A mix of Turkish and Russian personnel were there, as well as some Iranian. It overlooked the substantial marshalling yard, where flatcars loaded with armoured vehicles were arriving to be unloaded. Rakes of vans were being marshalled onto the massive rail ferries that crossed the lake—there was no direct link. They carried food and supplies for the embattled remnants of the Turkish Army, fighting to hang on further west. The “empties”, Hermione realised with a dim shock, arrived crammed with people—refugees.</p><p>But that was all she could see, before Nymphadora led them down to a bomb shelter, where a conference room had been set up. Luna and Larissa were waiting, and Hermione sucked in her breath sharply at Larissa’s pale and emaciated condition, and reached out immediately to embrace her friend. “Damn, what the hell happened to you?”</p><p>“Too much blood magic…”</p><p>Hermione stared at her, and was also unconvinced. “And?”</p><p>“...I took a dose. A hundred and fifty rads.”</p><p>Still holding her friend, Hermione sighed. “Lara, you need to – was that worth it?”</p><p>“If it leads to the Lake of Anahit, it certainly was,” Bellatrix remarked sharply as she moved to sit and pour herself a cup of tea. “It should effectively heal radiation damage.”</p><p>“Nothing else does,” Hermione protest, and let Lara go with another worried look.</p><p>“Well, she might be right. At the end, damage is just damage,” Larissa offered, and sat down with an exhausted sigh. “But it was really more than that, too. A hundred and fifty rads isn’t that much.”</p><p>“If you quit smoking, perhaps it will balance out,” Bella snarked from where she sat.</p><p>Larissa rolled her eyes. “Life is short, and war needs steady nerves.”</p><p>“So what did we find out?” Hermione changed the subject before her own smoking habit came up; Bella’s contempt for it was embarrassing.</p><p>Luna smiled pleasantly. “We found the lost Urartian city of Musasir, and it clearly says in the Temple of Haldi in Musasir, that the path to the Lake of Anahit, at the top of Ararat, lays through a temple of eternal flame, which keeps the world-serpent at bay, which stands on the shores of Lake Van—specifically, somewhere between, approximately, the modern cities of Tatvan and Erciş.”</p><p>“And that… Was all in Musasir?”</p><p>“Yes.” Larissa waved a hand, looking uncomfortable, and Hermione decided to drop the subject. Whatever had happened there had taken a lot out of her friend, and she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, that much was clear.</p><p>“So we’ve narrowed it down to a fire-temple on the shores of Lake Van?” Bella reached up with her right hand and rubbed at her forehead. “Oh, that will only take forever to look for. And with the Dark Lord’s forces on the march in this theatre, too, precisely to cut us off.”</p><p>“The temple lights the way,” Larissa murmured. “It will be as old as Urartian civilisation, but probably built-over with Zoroastrian era ruins.”</p><p>Hermione reached for one of the maps on the table, frowning at Larissa’s comment. “So Ararat is near Lake Van according to this record from Musasir? I hadn’t expected that. Does that mean it’s really Suphan Dagi, I wonder? That’s the only large stratovolcano near the lake.”</p><p>“If it is, the lake is magically occulted,” Nymphadora spoke, and flashed a brilliant smile. “However, temple first. It might even just have an ancient portkey in it, after all. And we have a plan. Russian Naval forces have deployed to the lake to arm the ferries and other large vessels. We will have one with a helicopter platform at our disposal for the search.”</p><p>“Divination?” Ginny asked.</p><p>“I’ll <em>try </em>it,” Luna offered, “though divining something magical, which has wanted to be hidden for a very long time, can… Go astray.”</p><p>Dora shrugged. “We’ll throw everything at it, and see what sticks. I don’t see any other alternative.”</p><p>“We simply have no alternative,” Bellatrix agreed over her tea. “Well, other than brooms.” She looked archly at Ginny. “Do you have your’s with you?”</p><p>“<em>Of course.</em>”</p><p>“Good, we’ll cover more ground that way, we’re talking about almost two hundred kilometres of coastline… Tonks, you’ll alert the appropriate air-defence authorities?”</p><p>“Yes, General Black,” she acknowledged. In the past few months, Tonks had gotten calmer around Bellatrix, and Hermione was thankful for it, but there was still an edge of contempt.</p><p>“When will the ship be ready?”</p><p>“Tomorrow, General.”</p><p>“Everyone needs to be ready for this operation tomorrow, then. Hermione, would you come with me?” Bella asked, lazily getting up.</p><p>“I’m finally going to be able to break my broom out,” Ginny was declaring excitedly behind them. But as they left, Hermione felt Tonks’ eyes on her.</p><p>“Where are we going?” She asked the dark witch as they headed back up through the stairs to the light, first.</p><p>“I just wanted to take a walk.” She sauntered down toward the shore, near to the train-ferry dock, looking at the lake. Hermione followed at her side.</p><p>“I don’t like the sea. Or rather, I do, but now I don’t.”</p><p>“Azkaban?”</p><p>“Yes.” Bellatrix closed her eyes. “Waves remind me of Azkaban.”</p><p>“I saw how tense you were on the crossing of the Black Sea. But you were calmer during the assault on Nikolayaev,” Hermione observed.</p><p>“That’s so, it’s always easier to be calm when I have something to kill. You wouldn’t understand, pet.”</p><p>With a shiver at the name, Hermione doffed her cap and stepped off the crumbling pavement down onto the beach. “Try me?”</p><p>“I … I hear things, from the past, and they’re only quiet when I am revelling in my anger.”</p><p>“I remember how you would get sometimes at night, your trouble sleeping…”</p><p>Bella laughed bitterly. “Trouble sleeping. That’s a nice, mild way to talk about it.”</p><p>“Tell me more?”</p><p>“No. That’s enough; you understand. I’ll deal with the ship. It’s just a lake, after all.”</p><p>“But you’re worried about something else?”</p><p>“Once I looked forward to a world at peace—our peace, a Roman peace, perhaps, but I did want peace. Now, when the fighting stops, I’m not sure that I can handle the world falling silent. The only thing worse than the waves in Azkaban is the silence—no voices, no music, no conversation.” She spun away, to stand in the wet sand, the waves of the lake nibbling around her boots. “Do you think I want the lake to heal my <em>body, </em>Hermione? I want the Water of Life to heal my <em>Mind </em>as well.”</p><p>“I’m going to …” <em>You don’t have any Gods to pray too, </em>Hermione mocked herself. “...I hope that comes true for you. I really do, Bella. You don’t deserve that.”</p><p>Bella cackled. “Let’s be honest, Hermione. A million deaths wouldn’t be enough for me.”</p><p>“Well, I’ve made a <em>choice </em>to see what’s good in you.”</p><p>“You’re in <em>lust </em>with me, and it would probably be best if you found someone else, even if you didn’t really want them at first.”</p><p>“Was that really what we had in Oslo?” Hermione forced her way in front of Bella, splashing her boots through the saline water of the lake.</p><p>“I – I don’t know,” she spun away from Hermione, and strode back to the headquarters building.</p><p>The younger witch watched Bella go for a while, torn between wanting to follow, and giving the woman her space. When Bella disappeared from view, she turned away, to watch another of the train ferries come in, and at last, lit up another belomor.</p><p>“<em>Hermione,</em>” she said out loud, to herself, “You have got to make up your mind. And when you do, you’re going to have to force her to make a choice—and whatever that choice is, that’s <em>it. </em>No more waiting. Either she wants this, or she doesn’t.” The choice of her own words seemed to imply her choice was inevitable, but Hermione was by no means sure. She wanted Bella, she sure did.</p><p>A nice long drag steadied her mind.</p><p>
  <em>But, yeah, she does deserve a million deaths. </em>
</p><p>A pounding beat of her heart.</p><p>
  <em>Lots of people get things they don’t deserve. Shit happens, so does life. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Of all things that she expected to have happen that next morning, the least of them was to wake up to Bella banging on the door to the dorm that she and Ginny were quartered in. “Hermione, something odd has happened, I’d like you in the operations room, please!” </span>
</p><p>“<span>...Ugh.” Hermione toppled out of bed. </span></p><p>“<span>...She sure is chipper in the morning when something’s gone wrong, isn’t she?” Ginny asked as she stirred. “At least she’s stopped calling you slurs, though. I couldn’t stand it for the slightest.” </span></p><p>“<span>Well, she didn’t order </span><em>you </em><span>to the ops room, so get back to sleep,” Hermione groused as she dragged on enough random bits of her uniform to look decent and professional enough for a staff already having to deal with Bella to not really complain about her too. </span><span>Then she tossed her greatcoat over it, which helped hide the lack of readiness and also might be appropriate even in September for the high plateau and mountains around Lake Van, before the sun brought the heat of the day. </span></p><p>
  <span>With no further ado, she hastened down to the operations room. Larissa was already there, drinking tea while leaning against a post, and Hermione had to hide a groan of relief at the hot samovar. She arrived at Bella’s side with a cup in her hand. </span>
</p><p>“<span>There’s an attack on a convoy travelling around the south shore of the lake, on the D300 highway west of Gevaş,” Bellatrix explained, as officers were marking locations based on reports. </span></p><p>“<span>On the shore of the lake?” Hermione looked at her with consternation, and stepped forward, checking the larger theatre map. “That’s two hundred and twenty kilometres behind our lines, General, straight line distance. The only kind of attack we should be seeing is tactical aircraft providing deep support, and the advanced raiding parties behind a major offensive. But they would be targeting strategic locations, which the D300 is not—most of our tonnage is moving by ship on Lake Van—and there’s nothing else in the vicinity to be high priority before a major offensive.” </span></p><p>“<span>General Akhatov is in command here, I’m strictly supernumerary for anything but the search,” Bella nodded graciously to the man, of Tatar descent, and probably chosen because of his religion to get along between with the Turkish and Iranian forces he was commanding. “So rather than stand around second-guessing your intentions, let me take some of my witches to </span><span>Gevaş, </span><span>General,” she now addressed him quickly. </span></p><p>“<span>It won’t be a casual thing, we have the latest reports. It’s definitely a magical attack,” he answered after looking up from a radio across the room. “Several wizards involved. ...who are possibly led by a Death Eater.” </span></p><p>
  <span>Bella’s voice was flat. “They may be on to us. Come on, Hermione.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Larissa stepped down, and Ginny was trailing behind her, of course she had woken up—and behind her, Tonks. And behind Tonks, Draco, and then Luna.</span>
</p><p>“<span>If you go,” Tonks said simply, “we all go. Except Larissa, she should really focus on getting better.” </span></p><p>“<span>Oh, don’t give me that. It’s all of us,” the Russian witch smirked. </span></p><p>“<span>If she wants to come, she can come,” Bella laughed. “We need every wand, Tonks, this isn’t the Order of the Phoenix—it’s War. Real fighting.”</span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>T</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>onks </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>rolled her eyes. Sometimes Bellatrix could be pointlessly petty. “You don’t want to go there.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bellatrix just smirked and shook her head. “All right. Enough of that. Let’s go.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Tonks turned to Larissa and Luna. “Disapparate out immediately if you get overwhelmed. I mean it. You’re an important connection to the Lake of Anahit now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>With that bit of advice, she nodded tightly, and turned to face her aunt. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hermione hastily finished her tea, and then assumed her position.</span>
</p><p>“<span><span>General Black, if you can get a handle on the enemy wizards, I can have an aerial desant force there to support you within five minutes!” Akhatov shouted, just before they apparated.</span></span></p><p>
  <span>Bella grinned, and tipped a salute his way.</span>
</p><p>They flashed away at once. Seven of them—with the situation that they were apparating into mostly unknown.</p><p>The flash of the dawn’s light breaking over the mountains. The air still cold. The stench of burning human bodies in the dawn, overlaid with the whiff of diesel smoke and crackling electronics.</p><p>The ruins of a battalion, being sent forward to the front near Diyarbakir, stretched out before them. A high, semi-circular ridge to the south of the lake loomed above fields, with the road almost right along the water.</p><p>Standing on top of that ridge were not one, but two, masked Death Eaters, and six subordinate wizards, flinging magic down against the knot of survivors, who had retreated to a small peninsula which thrust out into the lake. A single 2K22 Tunguska SPAAG had managed to get into position to fight hull down behind an old medieval stone wall. A single surviving MinKol wizard lay next to it, flinging <em>Protego </em>after <em>Protego </em>from a sitting position—almost certainly wounded--to keep the destructive spells of the ring of wizards blasting down from above off of that lone protection. Working in perfect coordination with him, the twin 30mm automatic cannon of the Tunguska hammered at the top of the ridge, trying to overcome the protective shields of at least one of the wizards.</p><p>Hermione had taken in the entire scene in a heartbeat by scanning her wand from side to side, calling forth a magnification spell. So had Bella.</p><p>“Hermione, take Larissa and relieve our position,” came the first crisp instruction, as her black hair licked in the breeze and she called up a masking spell—just in time, it was followed by a complicated shield as a few exploratory curses were sent in their direction. “I think I have stopped them from taking an accurate count of us. Tonks, take Draco and attack from the east, directly above us. Apparate again to the ridge-line, can you do it?”</p><p>“Of course!” Tonks answered a bit defiantly.</p><p>“Good. You are a Black. Ginny – take Luna and get to the west, on the ridge, too.”</p><p>“And you?” Hermione asked.</p><p>“You’ll see. Losing the Dark Mark didn’t—well, just do it. You’ll see!”</p><p>Hermione sucked in her breath. She had a sudden idea of what Bella planned, but she knew better in combat than to ask more questions. She reached out to Larissa, and they disapparated together.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She saw Bella </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>fly. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>No Broom. She knew Voldemort had done it, certainly, and it had nearly been the end of Harry when he had. Apparently, over the years, Bellatrix had picked it up as well. It would certainly be no secret—to Voldemort. It might be a surprise to </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>this </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>group, however. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Her own wand was flicking, building precisely shields which drove back the spells being flung at them from afar. The still burning fields provided some cover in front; perhaps someone had tried Fiendfyre, and failed to finish this band with it.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>A medic rushed forward to the wounded wizard. He was badly torn by </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>sectumsempra, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>bleeding out, but now he had a chance. Larissa could spare no magic to help him; she was fully involved in defending the pocket as well, there must have been about three hundred survivors in it, many wounded. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bella reached the ridge right in the middle. Her wand lit the sky in terrible flashes of colour and blackness, if blackness could flash, it did then. She orchestrated a bruising series of spells in which battering spells tore out parts of the ridge under the feet of the closest Morsmordre attackers, alternated neatly with reinforcements to her shield which kept their own spells away. Dancing in the middle of the fight, she neatly sectioned the ring of attackers in two – the middle of a storm, where the enemy formation was now in two halves, Ginny and Luna on one side, Tonks and Draco on the other side, and Bella right in the middle—fighting both groups of enemies at once.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione was almost a klick away from the main fight, now, and with situation having been quickly brought under control, she was almost angry. Bella was exposing herself far too much, and Hermione could help. She was confident of her skill to do short distance apparation in short succession after the longer one, even though combat apparation was, if anything, even more dangerous than the conventional kind. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>But Bella had ordered her to take this position, and so she stayed.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The young woman in the turret of the Tunguska tipped a salute to her. With the electronics down from the extensive use of magic around her, she had popped the hatch to fire the cannon optically, sighting with tracer rounds. The girl looked not more than sixteen, and in that state, when one became a veteran of battle, where terror had given way to steadiness and an unwillingness to let down one's comrades. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione acknowledged the salute. “Keep a steady watch, comrade!”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Of course, Colonel!” She spared a worried glance toward the wounded, but settled back into position.</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Suddenly, the deadly magical ballet on the ridge became one-sided. Instead of feeling relieved that the enemy had retreated, Hermione tensed and readied her wand. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Larissa started and did the same. “Fuck, we’re…” She didn’t even have the chance to finish the sentence before flinging the first spell.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Eight Morsmordre wizards attacked them both at once. They were attacking the peninsula! But why? There was no time to ask it, no time to answer it. Hermione and Larissa were totally defensive. Seeing how terrible the situation was, the wounded wizard—they hadn’t even had the time to get his name—pushed the medic aside to force him to take cover, from where he was being treated, and then raised his wand too. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>No surrender, fight until your last dying breath. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>It was one thing to say it, to scream it, to think it. Another to have your wand up, straining with magical energy, as you tried to hold off four people attacking you at once, including two Death Eaters, one of whom was lining up for a killing blow. Hermione didn’t even need to wait for her own death, she could imagine the words being spoken as the attack came together. Pin her in three directions and she had nothing left to hold against the fourth.</p><p>Except her service pistol. She dropped to one knee and drew it in the offhand, firing desperately to her right across her body, since she had to keep her wand up. One of the enemy wizards was forced to shield from both her magic and her bullets. It wasn’t enough, and Hermione steeled herself to die in the gleam of the morning’s sun over Lake Van.</p><p>But that meant he wasn’t ready to face a third attack, when the twin 30’s of the Tunguska opened fire again. A 30mm shell did horrifying things to a human leg, and the Morsmordre wizard had one fewer of those a moment later, in a spray of blood and shattered flesh. As he toppled, the claw of death around Hermione was shattered, and she avoided the sickening green flash of the <em>“Avada Kedavra</em>!” as it was uttered. Just in time.</p><p>But they had done their job. Bella and the rest of their force converged at once. It went from eight against three to seven against eight, in another heartbeat. Cackling, Bella tore into the group of Morsmordre wizards. And she <em>very much </em>had the upper hand.</p><p>It lasted just long enough for Alecto Carrow to rip her mask off. “Bellatrix! You’re a traitor, but I didn’t think you’d murder <em>me!</em>”</p><p>Bellatrix, for a brief moment, paused. Hermione’s thoughts flashed to the fact they were former lovers. It was just enough; in that moment’s distraction, Alecto reached out, and making contact with her compatriots, apparated them clear.</p><p>The wafting scent of burnt equipment and flesh and the acrid tang of the smoke still filled the air, but the battle was abruptly over. Hermione closed her eyes. She wasn’t sure if Bella’s moment of hesitation was good or bad. But there were a lot of open questions about what the hell had just happened, anyway. “Why did they attack us, here? Why did they keep a raid going against that kind of opposition?”</p><p>Bellatrix looked around. “I think it’s obvious.”</p><p>“I do too,” Tonks agreed. “There’s something important here. There’s old ruins here, and there’s definitely old buildings and ruins on that island off the coast,” she added, pointing to the high rock island which loomed some distance to the northwest.</p><p>“Luna, would you take a look?”</p><p>“Of course, General.” The blonde girl started forward, and Bellatrix moved to lean and lazily stretch against the side of the Tunguska.</p><p>In the meantime, the gunner had climbed out and hopped down.</p><p>“Good shot,” Hermione called.</p><p>“Thank you, Colonel,” she answered, but her mind was clearly on something—someone—else.</p><p>“You’re dismissed, go see to your comrade,” Hermione said immediately, and watched her go off to check on a fortunately lightly wounded somewhat older woman. Someone had a happy ending that day, at least.</p><p>For a day, anyway.</p><p>But all of life was day to day.</p><p>The medics were busy with the wounded, and slowly, the others began to decompress, cooking food, boiling tea, smoking cigarettes, in rituals to calm and steady the mind after combat. The helicopters arrived, to reinforce the position and send out teams to search for any cut-off survivors. Nonetheless, the battalion had taken heavy casualties.</p><p>But the witches—with Draco in tow—were soon dragged in a different direction. Luna, down by the sea, staring excitedly over a pit in the ground, that she had loosed some ancient protective magic to reveal. “Northwest, line of sight from the island, on the morning of the Solstice, the world mountain is revealed—the fire burns on the furthest shore,” she read reverently from the ancient Urartic, magical runes, not quite regular text.</p><p>“But there’s no bloody mountain there,” Bella exclaimed in frustration.</p><p>“The temple is good enough,” Tonks’ eyes gleamed. “When we get back to Van, we can be there by evening. It’s just a puzzle, but we’re a step closer to solving it. We’ve narrowed down the location. Of course...”</p><p>“Now it’s a race,” Hermione grimly finished for her.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>SPAAG -- Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Gun. The 2K22 Tunguska (2К22 "Тунгуска") is also called the SA-19 Grison in its NATO reporting code. It has a mixed armament of missiles and 30mm cannon.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0048"><h2>48. The Temple at the Edge of Eternity</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Temple at the Edge of Eternity</b>
</p><p> </p><p>The next day, Hermione stood on the deck of the converted rail ferry. The Cross of St. Andrew hung from her mast, and two Tunguska SPAAGs had been winched onto the deck, lashed into place with cables, to serve as anti-aircraft firepower; a heavy 240mm mortar was positioned on the rail car deck on the fantail, to engage targets ashore. An Mi-24 sat on the upper deck.</p><p>In a more intense theatre, closer to the front, or in a war with the full force of an <em> intact </em>world’s industrial base behind it, such an improvised warship wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. Here, she could do a great deal of hurt to any force approaching the lake—particularly with nine wizards and witches aboard.</p><p>Initially, the trip had started out with serious doubts about whether or not they would immediately find anything productive. There was no suitable mountain nearby to be the mythological Ararat/Damawand, if it, or they, were indeed distinct from their named counterparts in the modern world. But as they steamed up the course along the western shore of the lake, from Ahlat toward Adilcevaz, they felt a growing sense of unease. There was a magical power looming.</p><p>The E99 highway along the coast road was choked with the debris of human life that was a refugee column. Thousands of people—many the Kurds and Yezidi from northeast Syria—were rumbling along the road in any kind of vehicle which could move, from horse-carts and donkey-pulled dead cars to trucks carrying eighty people packed in, with the rags of old clothes and tents spread over the top to try and protect the occupants from the sun. The engines snorted and snarled and could be heard out across the lake, choking on the bad fuel they were given, and filling the faces of the refugees behind them with heavy soot and smoke.</p><p>Tonks was standing close by to Hermione, using her wand with magnification to scan the shore for ancient ruins. But the convoys both concealed part of the shore from their efforts, and distracted their hearts. Hermione could hear Tonks softly mutter – “It Was the Beginning of the Rout of Civilisation, of the Massacre of Mankind” – a dreadful old quote from <em> The War of the Worlds. </em></p><p><em> Change the word Mankind to Mugglekind, and it’s even true. </em>For all of their recent victories, the Middle East was currently proving that Voldemort had plenty of offensive firepower left at his disposal. He was just not using it rationally, he was focused on something else.</p><p>The Mountain. Immortality. Whatever dark magic power that Voldemort wanted.</p><p>Hermione forced her eyes away from the convoy, and searched another quadrant. Bellatrix and Ginny were visible at a distance—the dark witch had surprised the youngest Weasley by volunteering to take up a broom with her, neatly resolving the question of how Bella intended to cope with being on the ship. Draco trailed them by about two hundred metres, providing cover.</p><p>It was just south of Adilcevaz that Ginny’s wild waving signalled she had found something, above a high, somewhat squared round hill right southwest of the town and the harbour. They were tracking to the northeast, about three hundred metres off shore.</p><p>Hermione glanced at the position and then looked to Tonks. “It looks like a rock formation on the south flank from here, but it’s rectilinear and it could easily be ruins, especially old ones…”</p><p>Both women were silent for a moment. There was an imperceptible feeling of <em> something </em>in the air.</p><p>“Go forward and tell the Captain to come about to our previous position, and anchor,” Tonks said with quiet intensity. “That was odd.”</p><p>“Agreed.” Hermione went forward; about fifteen minutes later—with another slight, imperceptible feeling to the witches aboard the old ferry—they were anchored in place, closer in to the shore, by a distance of about two hundred metres. Boats were being lowered over the side, and the helicopter spun up, and transported a group of them up the hill quickly to the site that Draco, Bella and Ginny were already at.</p><p>There was a green valley on the southwest side of the slope. With the military deploying on the coast road below the hill, all of those refugees they had passed by would be stuck in place, until they were allowed to move forward again. The lucky ones were in the village and the green valley by the side of the roads, though the locals kept their doors and windows firmly barred, out of fear of looting.</p><p>Hermione brought a thermos of tea with her. “Ginny! Draco! Bella! What did you find?” Luna was making haste at her side.</p><p>“There’s inscriptions on the rock here,” Ginny explained. “This whole thing may look natural, it may be natural, but it’s definitely been carved and shaped.” Behind them, their words were briefly drowned out by the Galina taking off again to stand ready on overwatch.</p><p>Bella flashed a smile to Hermione, and reached for the thermos. “We’ll let Luna take a look at it, yes?”</p><p>“Of course, General Black,” the blonde woman smiled vaguely, and distantly, as if thinking of something else, and stepped forward up to the shadowed rock wall.</p><p>Larissa came up the hill with the others. She had a woman with her, with hair as curly as Bella’s, her features dusky. “Zoë of Palmyra. She came up from Tatvan.”</p><p>“I heard the convoys had stopped,” the Palmyran observed. “Is… General Black?”</p><p>“Yes?” Bellatrix turned to her.</p><p>“Can they resume passing through?”</p><p>“Not yet. We are on the edge of something important.” Bella turned to Larissa. “Councillor Naryshkina?”</p><p>“General?”</p><p>“This is the woman who helped you with the Yezidi at al-Qamishli?”</p><p>“Yes, General Black.”</p><p>“Come over here, please.” Bella turned back toward the wall.</p><p>“General, this matter is to be classified!” Larissa hollered after her.</p><p>“I’m sure my niece can shoot me like a muggle if she disagrees,” Bella smirked, sauntering back to Luna’s side, and flashing a look at Nymphadora. Andromeda’s daughter closed her eyes for a moment, and then shrugged.</p><p>“We don’t have enough time,” the Hufflepuff observed, “and we could use the help. The enemy clearly knows, anyway, Larissa Sergeivna.”</p><p>Larissa sighed and found a place to sit on a rock, and light up a cigarette. She looked around with a great deal of unease, and Hermione, remembering the strange way her friend had acted since they had reunited, decided to give her some distance.</p><p>Instead, she stepped closer to Bella, and the wall. There was now a cluster around Luna, who seemed quite content to translate for a while, using a grease pencil to make overlays. “There’s a <em> lot </em>to unpack here. But it’s not Urartian, it’s in Old Persia. Makes sense! This was part of the Persian Empire for a very long time. It says, simply, that for the health of the land, the flame of Ahura Mazda is eternally kindled here, and keeping it kindled here, is the sacred charge of all the priests and priestesses of the Lord. It is an exhortation to be diligent in one’s duties.”</p><p>Bella snorted and turned away to pace. “Completely useless. Just the kind of turn we needed. Is this even the site, then? It is on the diagonal line across the lake.”</p><p>“...This matches the description well, though. Uhm, … Miss Palmyra?”</p><p>“Zoë,” the woman rolled her eyes. “Or Zoë bint Tavarik if you prefer.”</p><p>“Ah, of course.” In a way, the easy informality was pleasant. And it was interesting that, as it was with Zoë’s name, Hermione suspected her father’s name was pre-Islamic. “Well, we felt something off the coast, arriving. Something odd, like it’s on the tip of the tongue but you can’t really identify what it is. I really think this is important. Do you have any ideas?”</p><p>“No, but if you don’t, she might,” the woman gestured sharply to Larissa.</p><p>Larissa looked at the two of them and got up, quietly walking over with her cigarette. She shrugged laconically. “I heard. I think… It might be very simple. It’s an exhortation to maintain the sacred flame of the temple for the health of the land. Well. There’s no sacred flame. Kindle it. See if magic happens?”</p><p>“Why would <em>muggle </em>priests <em>lighting a fire </em>matter in the slightest for a magically occluded mountain?” Bellatrix asked as she spun back around in her pacing, tin cup of tea still in her gloved left hand.</p><p>“In the ancient times,” Larissa began, with her expression almost deathlessly painful, “there was no such distinction of muggle and wizard, of the magical-world and the muggle world. Everyone understood there was magic, there were Gods, there were powers, and some were talented to work with them. What was wrought here was the creation of a community, a culture, a nation. Kindle the flame.”</p><p>Zoë’s eyes gleamed. “Well, of course, then. Send for the Yezidi in the valley. It was their scroll, that spoke of the flame.”</p><p>“It was,” Larissa agreed with a nod.</p><p>Hermione stepped closer to her friend. “Are… You going to be okay, Lara?”</p><p>“I have to be. I have – <em>I lived in the past,</em>” Larissa explained. “That’s what happened in Musasir. It was a day with the dead, when they were living. There’s no other way to describe it. But we can make ritual happen here, now.”</p><p>The British witch reached out and gave her friend a quick hug, but she couldn’t help but notice, in Bella’s eyes, an equally quick flash of jealousy.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>They distributed food from the ship to the refugees, and after some debate and meetings, arrangements were made for some of the Yezidi men to climb up to the ruins of the temple, that Luna was using magic to clear, and steadily reveal more and more of the works. They did not yet agree to build a fire there, even when several scroll-keepers who knew of the story that Zoë had arranged for them to hear, had confirmed the particulars.</p><p>Out of respect, the Russian personnel, and Zoë and Bellatrix, all returned down to the valley on the southern flank. Ginny found a pomegranate tree, and they ate the little red seeds. In the high mountains here, in these fertile little valleys, they would ripen in September, the first to do so in the year.</p><p>There were no questions to ask, and to pressure them or attempt to watch their actions, to listen to their deliberations, would surely see a quick end to the entire process from the secretive people. So, the troops remained down by the road, in defensive positions, and the witches and wizards sat under a pomegranate tree, an ate them with their rations and their tea.</p><p>It was close to midnight when Ginny excitedly called out about the dim flickering on the ridge. “I think they’ve actually started a fire in the place of the old eternal flame, perhaps there will be…”</p><p>Hermione felt a dull, queer rush, through the air.</p><p>“<em>Oh. My. God,” </em>Tonks stuttered. She had been looking out toward the lake, with Draco. Draco’s face went as pale as a sheet.</p><p>Bellatrix turned with a lean and hungry look, and her eyes lit up. “<em> Gods. </em>The veil wears thin.”</p><p>Hermione felt chills shoot down her spin from top to bottom, shivers gripping her body. She slowly scooted around from where she sat on the grass. <em> Dwarfing </em> the ferry, dwarfing the hill, dwarfing the <em> everything, </em>blotting out half the sky, in fact, the ferry was anchored alongside of it, like a mite on the flank of an elephant, like a building on the flank of a mountain, like … Like an exploration vessel sitting next to the side of some terrific thrusting island volcano, rising out of the depths.</p><p>It went up, and up, and up. The top was capped in white. In dwarfed every other mountain, it was so terribly close. But in the wane dark-light of the night, it seemed ghostly, as if it were just a vision, or a mystic image. No wonder Bella’s comment. They were seeing perhaps Damawand, or perhaps Ararat, but was it really there?</p><p>Then Hermione realised that, really, Bella’s statement meant something else entirely. A veil occluded, it hid things. It was wearing thin, but… “Oh My God. That’s the mountain. That's a real mountain.”</p><p>“Yes, it is,” Larissa shuddered. “There was an Unplottable, Occluded stratovolcano in Lake Van—look, the very shape of the shoreline… It’s different. Might just be an answer to the Closure Problem.”</p><p>Tonks was <em> grinning. </em> “Stop being so scared, all of you. It’s <em> amazing. </em>It’s the most magical thing I’ve gotten to see in years. If the veil is partially open… Perhaps there is a path from the temple.”</p><p>“A magical path, you mean.” Bella got up. “Yes, I would not expect anything less.”</p><p>Fatigue and exhaustion were banished. If it was wonder or fear or, Hermione was confident in her case, both, it didn’t matter. The intensity of the emotions kept them awake, curiosity drove them on. “Draco, how tall do you think it is?”</p><p>“I think it’s at least six thousand metres from the level of Lake Van.”</p><p>“I concur,” Hermione nodded. She knew he was actually quite smart, given the chance to escape the world where the expectations of his father and culture had pushed him into his deeds. He was staying close to Larissa, and seemed worried about her. Larissa looked, very much, like a woman who was about to die, possessed of the cool composure of being more interested in duty than in life. Tonks’ appeal had picked up the spirits of several of the others in the fact of that eerie sight, but not her.</p><p>Luna led them with a certain calm up the flank of the Hill, and back to the Temple. The Yezidi men were gathered around the flame, and it was Zoë who approached to speak with them. As she did, the illumination of a magical light from Luna’s wand brought a doorway into view, where a few hours before, Hermione could have sworn there had only been rock.</p><p>“Well, I suppose if we go in, we may get our insides turned inside out, but we’ll find out definitely, one way or another,” Luna shrugged, and stepped forward with the fearless certitude of one not quite sane. With her eyes wide, Hermione hastened after her; Tonks needed no prompting and was not afraid, though, and as Hermione walked forward, it forced Bella to folow.</p><p>Just as well, because there was a Persian woman, in the brocaded skirts and robes of the Sassanid court, with a gold chain around her neck, who was holding Luna at wand-point with a <em> Rabdos </em> the same measure as Koschei’s, and Hermione readied her own wand as she saw the sickly green energy crackling at the tip of the <em> Rabdos. </em></p><p>“Back away from her,” Tonks ordered coolly; of course her own wand was already at the ready.</p><p>A laugh, in a hoarse contralto, echoed through the stone chamber. “You do not command me here.”</p><p>Luna was one of those people about whom Hermione had no doubt that she would fight for. “It’s one witch against the seven of us,” she advised the strange, tall woman. “Do you really intend to chance it?”</p><p>The figure holding Luna at wandpoint cackled and laughed. “A <em> witch </em>? I’m so flattered – flattered!”</p><p>“...The guardian spoke Urartian,” Larissa muttered.</p><p>“No, English!”</p><p>“I heard Old Persian…”</p><p>“...The Guardian?” Bella stepped forward. “Not sure about the Witch part, actually.”</p><p>“Also that.”</p><p>“It’s perfectly alright. Like I said, I was flattered.” The figure lowered their wand and made an exaggerated, mocking bow—but dark eyes remained mostly fixed on Larissa. “I am Elahaïs. You have one of your number different from the rest. One who understands me more than the rest.”</p><p>“Yes,” Larissa agreed. “Will you let us pass?”</p><p>“To my chamber,” Elahaïs shrugged, and turned to lead them on. “I never thought to wake. I thought the Caliph and his heirs would finish our faith forever.”</p><p>“The Caliph?”</p><p>A black laugh, as they entered a finally appointed chamber, filled with gold and chalices, gems and fine desks, a bed, tables—excellently woven carpets on the floor. Elahaïs moved to sit in the Persian fashion, but this was not the Persian of Islam, this was not a land of tea and coffee. The motifs showed the angels of Zoroastrianism. “Caliph Umar, of course.”</p><p>The figure abruptly spun toward Larissa, and grabbed her firmly with her off-hand by the collar of her uniform. “Hey, it seems you’re a whole woman, but I can taste the knife in your soul.”</p><p>“A Daughter of the Turks taught me to live the lives of old magicians, where they leave their magic, they leave a measure of their life,” Larissa answered, her eyes lighting, now, the fire back in her. “How else, noble eunuch, did you expect to be found?”</p><p>“I expected only the worthy,” Elahaïs murmured, as for the others, the faint sense of unrightness about the figure before them abruptly became clear. “I think only betwixt the lot of you do you make one worthy soul. Oh, no, I won’t lie; I see the strength of your hearts.”</p><p>Or perhaps it only felt like it did.</p><p>“You’re the eunuch who served the Caliph Umar with Koschei the Deathless,” Hermione said flatly, her tone losing all expression.</p><p>“Well spotted!” The Rabdos abruptly swung. “See the story of this temple.”</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>They were seized, bodily, and deposited under the burning sun of the hot desert. There was an enormous assembly, in a hall in the heart of a city which, Hermione realised with a start, was probably Medina. It was the audience hall of the Caliphate, in the 7<sup> th </sup> century. There was nothing else it could be.</p><p>Umar sat confidently on a low dais, and before him, the eunuch knelt to the side, forehead pressed into the stone, in abject submission. Standing before the Caliph, was a slightly Turkic figure, who in dress, and by the sword at his side that she recognised, was Koschei the Deathless, holding a gold-gilt bronze vase.</p><p>Larissa, dressed as Hermione was in robes and shawls, stepped closer to her friend. “You are seeing the past as I saw the past,” she murmured. It was the only centring point that Hermione had in what was otherwise the terrific, absolutely real spectacle of seeing some forgotten history of the Rashidun Caliphate unfolding before her eyes in real-time, in real colour, <em> in the flesh. </em></p><p>“Your Eminence, the matter is this. If we secure the temple for ourselves – it is the home of the Simurgh! The path of the Simurgh to the world! It makes the dry-lands fertile, and if you journey to the crater, you can find the Water of Life. I have brought you a sample, Your Eminence, for your own health and recovery. It is said that for as long as you drink it, you will remain young, and you will not die. Your Eminence, I give this as a gift of my loyalty, and beg you to permit me to secure the temple, and hold it in perfect fastness with all the priests, so that you may enjoy this bounty of Creation.”</p><p>He advanced toward the throne, and knelt before Umar, extending the vase up with both of his hands. The Caliph’s attendants ceremoniously took it from it, and lifted it the rest of the way, to the modestly dressed man who ruled the great Empire of Muhammad’s Companions, from North Africa to Persia, from the Anti-Caucasus to Yemen.</p><p>The people in the audience hall watched with wonder, and great interest, at the interaction between this man, who had walked alongside the Prophet, and heard him speak, and this sorcerer. The <em>Emir-ul’Muminin </em>was being promised much by the sorcerer, but his faith was as sure a rock as the Prophet could have wished.</p><p>Umar took the vase. He raised up to his side, and looked at it quietly. Then, holding it, he stood, looming over the kneeling Koschei. He uncorked the vase, and Koschei looked up, eager.</p><p>Then Umar spoke, his voice a righteous thunder. “Only God can grant Immortality, in the Gardens of Paradise. Not this water of the polytheists and unbelievers!” He inverted the vase in his hands, and the water of life splashed down, to do no more than soak his carpet, as Koschei trembled in shock, horror, defeat, terror, and was overcome by the desire for the water, such that even in the midst of such a dangerous moment, he flashed his tongue out to try and capture a few drops as they splashed down to be lost forever under the desert sun. Around them, the people erupted into cheers. <em>"Allah-u-Ackbar! At-Tawakkul 'ala Allah!" </em></p><p>Then he tossed the vase down, and dented it with a single firm kick. “You have an opportunity to redeem yourself. Return to Kufa, muster your Army, and destroy this profane temple of the unbelievers utterly! But it will not be you who is in command, but the least of slaves—let the eunuch lead the Army! Now go from my sight and do your duty before God – cast it down, stone from stone!”</p><p>Elahaïs rose, and with a courtly, deep bow to the Caliph, stepped to Koschei’s side. “Come, let us do the work with which we have been tasked.”</p><p>The vision faded away. All of them were back where they had been, in these subterranean rooms within the ruins of the temple. Elahaïs faced them, with burning black eyes. “What the Caliph of the Muslims did not account for,” the eunuch explained smoothly, “was that I had traded my manhood for a magical power like few others. Koschei knew it, and spared me, and bound me. But I had a way out of even his power; and I, in fact, have preserved the bridge to the Lake of Anahit for you… If you dare to choose rightly. Remember, this mountain is not merely the temple of a Goddess at the top; it is also the Gaol of Azi Dahak.”</p><p>Elahaïs’ eyes fixed directly on Bellatrix. “And I wonder which one <em> you </em>are really looking for.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0049"><h2>49. The Simurgh</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Simurgh</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix did not have the opportunity to open her mouth when she was swept away. Instead, she felt herself on a horse—and she certainly knew how to ride horses, though it was ridiculous for wizards to do so for anything but amusement in the modern day—and the harsh dust and sun of the noonday sun was blasting down over her head. She remembered, fresh in her memory, riding like this for days and days, as the Army wended its way north from the Fertile Crescent, toward the Lake.</p><p>Elahaïs and Koschei rode together, with Koschei—Abd’ul-Kabir, by the Muslim name he had been given those years ago on his supposed conversion—seething. Elahaïs only smirked. “Why does it bother you so much, that a slave commands your Army? You were a slave once; then you commanded an Army, perhaps it is just all a fair turn of fate that now your slave commands your Army, and your own commanders, who are now good Muslims, will obey me over you, by the command of the Caliph. Perhaps he intended it to humble you, and you, My Lord, are very bad at being humbled.”</p><p>“You are an insolent dog.” Koschei shook with rage. “Immortality sits on our fingertips. <em>Why did you never take it? </em>Why did not the Shahenshah rule for a thousand years?”</p><p>“You don’t call me an insolent dog when you take me to bed,” the eunuch snarked nastily in that archly feminine voice. “Perhaps,” Elahaïs then turned away, and looked idly to the hills, letting her horse follow the course of the column, “we knew there were other risks in the world. The order of the Fire-Magi knew well that the battle between Good and Evil can be influenced by the hearts and minds of men, and indeed, it’s quite dangerous to take the Water of Life from the lake of Anahit. Worse still is the evil of the serpent, in the depths of the mountain. All things have a purpose, and Umar has a point about the risks of what lays at the top of Ararat.”</p><p>Bella’s eyes narrowed, in this other form, this form of memories.</p><p>“However,” Elahaïs <em>winked, </em>“if you can find out a way to keep the Water of Life flowing in another place, I will let you take some, if you can survive the act. Be clever. Go north. Umar will not conquer the world.”</p><p>“You are a brazen schemer, you would not offer me such a thing,” his eyes flared with lust nonetheless, “unless it came with a price.”</p><p>“Oh yes. You will go to the lands of the furthest north, and steal some of the <em>Water of Death </em>from she who is Witch, Woman and Goddess--the Baba Yaga. I require it. And now, Koschei, <em>I am in charge. </em>The bonds you wove over me were quite legalistic. Umar was your commander, and he overrode them. You will find that if you try to test your will against me in a wizard’s battle, I will not bow to you. Be clever and reasonable, Koschei. Your usefulness to the Caliph is at an end. You know the northern lands well.”</p><p>“You mean to betray him. But if the bond follows his command, you cannot.”</p><p>“No. I mean to obey him. He just doesn’t understand the consequences.”</p><p>They crossed the col of the ridge and Lake Van spread out before them. Bella sucked in her breath. She could see the same valley, in truth, little changed between the 7<sup> th </sup> century and the 21 <sup> st </sup> century. Elahaïs’ <em> Rabdos </em>spun in a grand circle in the air, and the mountain wavered into view, dominating the lake. The eunuch was bemused by the way Koschei’s gaze shot toward it, with a barely disguised lust for immortality.</p><p>Elahaïs laughed. “Your weakness betrays you. She, the Mistress of your own lust.” Horse rearing and spinning, the Persian eunuch called to the troops. “Form your companies, in order of advance. File-closers, seventy ranks deep, we will be advancing down the ridge-line! Cavalry, with me!”</p><p>The temple gates were barred, and Bellatrix could see that the priests stood with arms. The smoke rose from the sacred fire in the middle. In their own ranks, she pressed close to Elahaïs as part of the guard. The Black Banner Jihad was uncased to flutter in the wind over the Army.</p><p>“<em>Archers</em>!”</p><p>The columns of archers turned out to the flanks as the subordinate commanders positioned them on the slopes to fire up and over the advancing infantry. The Black Banner came up alongside Elahaïs, and the men of the Army cheered. “<em> Allah-u-Ackbar! </em>”</p><p>A hail of arrows descended across the temple, again, and again, pounding through a full quarrel as they rained like a heavy hail down upon the walls, striking and killing countless of the Priests as they approached the walls. The eunuch was very brave, and fought at the head of the troops, inspiring them close to the walls, and disdainful of the return-fire of the priests, even when not using magic. “Muslims,” Elahaïs called, “You are the slaves of al-Qahhar, and overcome in His name!” al-Qahhar. Bellatrix instinctively knew what the name was; The Ever-Dominating, the Conqueror, the Prevailer. The one who overcomes all obstacles. The roars of their battle-cries swept the field, and the Army surmounted the walls and the gates with ladders.</p><p>The priests fought furiously, and bitterly, until the walls were stained wet with blood, but the advanced columns of infantry seized the gate-houses, and forced them open; the cavalry at once rallied, re-formed, and stormed through to the central courtyard, overcoming the Fire-Magi as they prepared themselves for a final stand. Bellatrix, with her sword, claimed several men in the moment of the wild swirl of battle and sand in the wind. The cavalry stormed through them on the charge, the <em> takbir </em>easy and quick on their lips as a battle-cry.</p><p>As they completed their murderous rout of the defenders, Elahaïs rode up alongside Bellatrix, and revealed that this was more than just history playing out before Bella’s eyes. “My dear Lady Black,” the eunuch cackled, “know that all that happens here is alive in the moment. You are real, and if this is a dream, it is also no dream.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked at the gash in her side abruptly and reached, hastily, for her wand. But she was not exactly Bellatrix, in a different form, a different body, and there was no wand, only sword and armour, on a steady horse.</p><p>And then she saw it. A great chalice of what could only be the Water of Life, sitting before the altar, settling in steam upon it, as it gently drained out to sizzle into steam upon the flames. <em> I have no need of the mountain in my own time! </em> Bellatrix suddenly thought, struck through with the realisation of the moment, that perhaps <em> this </em>was the path to the Water of Life that Elahaïs guarded, that no-one would ascend the mountain, but in fact the water in the chalice would last forever, and always be accessible, long after the temple was a memory. Perhaps she had just proved herself worthy of it, and Elahaïs’ words were, in fact, the gift of access. She had been challenged, and proved herself. This, a mere battle with swords? Bellatrix was as sure with a blade as a wand, she was wounded but not mortally, and it had been a short, if hot, work.</p><p>But there was the scream of a desperate voice, in a foreign tongue, but yet so familiar to her. She turned away from the chalice. It was <em> Hermione, </em> it was <em> recognisably </em>Hermione, whole in her own body as Bellatrix was not, in the robes of a Priestess of Anahit. She held a Shamshir in hand, and fought with the desperation of the condemned, facing three of the soldiers of the Caliphate, for the moment checking them all with a brilliance of form and pose that was beautiful in every respect, with swirling robes and a well-handled target shield in her off-hand. But she was doomed, for another dozen jihadis were coming for her, with the end of organised resistance.</p><p>
  <em> ...know that all that happens here is alive in the moment. You are real, and if this is a dream, it is also no dream. </em>
</p><p><em> The others were here. </em>She might have participated in killing them, even. They were all here. Bellatrix’s eyes flared, wild and terrible, in the moment of horrible realisation. Her heart was riven between the Water, and Hermione’s Last Stand.</p><p>She made her choice, and proved herself a betrayer of an Army once again, for the sake of the feeling of love for a single being. The first time had been for her daughter. The unnatural feelings, of another person, another life, for the Army of God, were no match for what she felt flare in her heart. Feeling the wet blood already on the blade of her sword, Bella resolved to see if it would channel some magic for her, and turned to the right, bringing her horse to a gallop. <em> “HERMIONE </em>!” The second time had been for the woman she fell in love with.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix reappeared in her own body, falling with a start, from a desperate rush that transformed ineptly into her own form, to collapse across Hermione. <em> “HERMIONE! </em>” Her shout still echoed across Elahaïs’ hall. Her blood, from a very real wound, struck by a shamshir thirteen hundred years in the past, dripped across the wonderful rugs spread across the rock floor.</p><p>The two women swept each other into an embrace as Bella staggered and fell against the younger witch. The others stared openly. They had <em> not </em>joined the two women in this vision, as Hermione gasped in ragged breaths, at the extreme exertion, and the terrible horror, of what had come to pass before her eyes, in the instances which had lasted days, of being in and living in the past, on the edge of destruction.</p><p>Elahaïs grinned, wicked and sickly in the thin magic light of the underground chamber. “Though the hour is late, Bellatrix Black, perhaps there is hope for you after all. I will warn you, however. There are three challenges before your fate on the mountain can be known, and you have only passed one. The first. The easiest. Each of the others will have consequences, no matter which you choose, which are irrevocable.”</p><p>Hermione was still breathing hard around Bella, her arms wrapped firmly around her. Bellatrix leaned down, and kissed her forehead. “This is over,” she whispered insistently to the younger woman. “That dream, that experience, it’s over. These challenges are laid on <em> me, </em>not you.”</p><p>“You’re <em>bleeding. </em>You need…”</p><p>“It will be fine, if we reach the water,” Bellatrix murmured, and turned back. “The Water of Death, Elahaïs, what did you do with it?” The dark witch demanded sharply.</p><p>“What do you think?” The eunuch’s arms spread to gesture around the entirety of the chamber. “I destroyed the whole Sassanid Empire, to deny it to the enemy, but I laid the seeds of our own resurrection in the ashes. In this age around you, the land is dried, so many of the fertile places are desiccated, the beautiful gardens and orchards and farms of the age of Musasir, or even of Cyrus, have passed unto dust. The irrigation systems are ruined, even as the populations surge in perpetual poverty, the arable land is continuously growing smaller, and our descendants must bring in the technology of foreigners and pump black oil from the ground to compensate for the loss. Once the whole of our Persian lands, from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush, was fertile and lush. We held the greater part of the world’s population and it was the healthiest and best fed in the whole world, and, there were whole nations in every valley. Now the dusty Tels and rubble mounds are surrounded by shanties, and the soil spins into the air, and the people who ruled the world, are measured the least, with Empires that comprised all the finest nations of the world, dusty relics which you Europeans commanded like playthings and whores.”</p><p>“...But….” Elahaïs laughed, “there is still a way to the mountain, and back down from it. In fact, there are two ways.”</p><p>Hermione took a ragged breath. “We are on the path of Anahit. The path of Azi Dahaka also remains, does it not?” She almost moaned in horror, from below Bellatrix.</p><p>“Yes. And I was very interested in knowing if your dear Bellatrix Black intended to go up or down.”</p><p>Bellatrix was surprised, then, as Ginny approached, and without remonstrance, used a length of her uniform jacket to tighten around the wound to her torso, with a look on her face, that forbade any discussion. Despite her hesitance, Hermione’s affection was apparently enough, Ginny would help her.</p><p>Bella looked from Hermione to the eunuch, and had a sudden flare of insight. <em> The Water of Death. </em> She felt a creeping sense of disassociation. The open question, unspoken since the moment they had entered this room, was <em> what </em>Elahaïs was.</p><p>Bella remembered the words, which had been spoken thirteen hundred years ago. <em> No. I mean to obey him. He just doesn’t understand the consequences </em>“You’re dead,” Bella addressed the eunuch. “You’re dead, and you obeyed him. You pulled down the temple, rock for rock.”</p><p>“Of course!”</p><p>“So, we’re <em>in </em>the ground right now. This chamber is collapsed.”</p><p>“<em>Of course</em>!”</p><p>Bella saw dawning looks of horror on the others, but she ignored them, and grinned, and tipped a salute to Elahaïs, even as her face was flushed with sweat from the pain and shock of her injury. “Few more brilliant Magi have lived, I think. This is a <em> Room of Requirement. </em> A <b>dead </b> Room of Requirement, just like the one at Hogwarts is now. But a living magical construct never <em> really </em> dies. You’re a <em> ghost, </em> but in a <b>dead </b>Room of Requirement, you can have anything you desire. You could kill anyone who follows the Path of Anahit. You can grab someone by the neck as if you still had a physical body to interact with the physical world, you can force someone to relive your past with enough realism to put a sword-wound in her side, you can cast magic with the full vigour of life. You can remember the future beyond your own death, as no ghost in the normal world can. Within your four ghostly walls, you might as well be a God. You created this with the Water of Death, to keep the path to the Mountain open, even when you obeyed Umar’s command, and destroyed the temple in fact.”</p><p>“That which is dead cannot die,” Tonks whispered in a somewhat horrified fascination.</p><p>“There are two gates, Bellatrix Black. Choose wisely.” Elahaïs, laughing, turned to the side, and with a flick of the Rabdos, opened a passage in the rock on the far side of the room from the entrance, before turning to Larissa.</p><p>“Larissa Sergeivna Naryshkina, <em>as for you, </em>who experienced Musasir as I did, as a woman of the knife; if you wish to live in this time, and not be haunted by the past unto your own wasting and death, I will be plain with you. The Simurgh must fly. Do what you must.”</p><p>Bellatrix paused, and turned back. “Do you mean to set her against me, ghost?”</p><p>“No – You will make that your choice in your own heart!”</p><p>“So be it! I am already meant for Hell and I won’t turn back now.” With the furious intensity of emotion fuelled by pain and shock and wonder and anticipation, Bellatrix turned back toward the entrance to the Path of Anahit. “I will choose rightly between your two gates.”</p><p>As they walked forth from the undead room, Elahaïs’ laughter unnervingly echoed behind them—but Hermione pressed close to Bellatrix, and helped her on.</p><p>Then, before the path closed behind them, the eunuch’s voice echoed one more time. “Remember the Path of Azi Dahaka.”</p><p>Hermione sucked in her breath.</p><p>“Pet, <em>what is the second path</em>?” Bella asked, as they advanced down a rock-hewn tunnel lower into the hill.</p><p>“Bella,” Hermione mustered the memories from the brief experience of a past life, “it’s the route to the mountain through the Gaol of Azi Dahaka, the Lord of Ten Thousand Serpents. It’s the route of darkness. That’s what the temple was meant to guard, since Rustam founded it after defeating Azi Dahaka and bottling him up. We followed the path of light, but the path of darkness… That’s what the Carrows were following. We <em>are </em>in a race. They could already be there.”</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Though she struggled on, and tried to be strong for the wounded Bella, Hermione herself was crying, sometimes, and leaning on Larissa, who was trying to be strong for her. Now they had all experienced it, all three of them. The past. A dead past. They had gotten to know those buried in the dust of centuries.</p><p>Hermione remembered the priests and priestesses of the temple, and understood vaguely the gambit which Elahaïs had attempted, burrowing hope for the future into the death and destruction of all those around her. But they had been real living people, and they had been murdered by one they felt was a traitor to their race and cause, not understanding the long game that the eunuch played. It was bitter dust indeed, and no wonder Elahaïs had become such a powerful ghost, even beyond the temple’s undead Room of Requirement.</p><p>As they finally exited the tunnel, they were standing on the shore of the lake. It was as if the tunnel was pointless; it simply exited at the base of the hill, past the road, right down by the rocks, along the water of the lake. There was a narrow strait between the rock shore and the rock of the island which <em> was </em>the mountain, but Hermione remembered the talk of the priests and priestesses of the temple, dimly edging around around her memories as if she had indeed lived all of it. “Come on. There’s a walkway, as long as you go perfectly straight, and the waves aren’t strong enough to sweep you off.”</p><p>She stepped forward, and step after step, her boots hit the megalithic stones laid in interlocking hexagonal patterns which formed a submerged causeway across the strait. The water slowly rose to flood their boots, to soak their pants, to lick at their hips, and in Bella’s case, right to her waist, but it then slowly receded, and they rose carefully toward the island. The island which was whole, real, complete, not a mirage, but a massive mountain. A mountain they would somehow have to climb to an altitude of six thousand metres upon, while soaking wet.</p><p>Reaching the far shore, Ginny and Draco collected some driftwood; Tonks insisted on using a few healing spells on her aunt’s wound, and a fire was soon roaring, while they performed drying spells on each other. It was still summer, but when the sun went down, they all knew this mountain would be bitterly, bitterly cold.</p><p>“It is morning, isn’t it?” Ginny asked, disconcerted, not sure how much time had past by in the Room.</p><p>“Yes, but we’ll not climb a six-thousander in a single day,” Larissa murmured. “To be honest, we’ll need supplemental oxygen. We haven’t acclimated. It will be a brutal climb. The route is at least as bad as Kilimanjaro; it may require no special gear, but you could still die if you aren’t careful or fit.”</p><p>Hermione looked into the flames. “Actually,” she coughed, “I think as long as we’re travelling the path, we can go any way we please. Bella, why don’t you fly to the top? You learned how to fly without a broom—from Voldemort, right?”</p><p>“There’s at least <em>two </em>Death Eaters, Hermione. My aunt is a powerful witch, but not powerful enough to take on that entire crew if they are going to reach the top themselves,” Tonks interjected.</p><p>“Then we apparate.” Larissa rose. “I am touched by this place, it recognises me. Let me try it.”</p><p>“It will be your doom if it <em>doesn’t </em>work,” Draco remarked hastily. “You have already pushed yourself to the limit, Larissa Sergeivna. This risks death, perhaps for nothing. I would remind you that to apparate in a powerfully occulted place is to push yourself directly against the protective magic.”</p><p>“I will test it. If it recognises me, it will recognise Hermione as well, and she can disapparate the rest of you here, up to the top. If it doesn’t, I’ve given my life for my country and my people, it’s as simple as that.” Before anyone could stop her, Larissa tipped a salute, and grasped her wand. She disappeared in a flash.</p><p>Hermione closed her eyes, and started crying. “Damnit, damnit, damnit. I feel like she’s falling to pieces and she wants to die.”</p><p>“But the courage and luck of the damned is still with her,” Luna said, gently. She was looking to the peak, and the others followed her gaze. The blinking brilliance of a signal light hailed them, in the familiar patterns of military signal code.</p><p>Hermione pulled herself to her feet. “Well, come on. I’m not leaving Larissa up there by herself for a minute longer than we have to.”</p><p>They joined together, hand to hand, and Hermione readied her wand. With a wrenching, overwhelming power, she flung them toward the top of the mountain, a clear sight which could be easily held in her head. In that moment, it seemed like time slowed down into an ugly syrup, from which the movement of thought became slow and uncertain. A power engulfed them.</p><p>Hermione saw the caves in the belly of the mountain. She saw a black door. It was square and small, barely large enough for a tall man to walk through it while standing upright, but there were a billion stars in it. A yawning sense of doom sliced like an icy blade through her soul.</p><p>Then it snapped back as if a hand had been forced to release them, she could see solid white, nothing more, and then, and then, they stood on the rim of the crater. Below them was a frozen crater lake. The crater rim was perfectly intact; barring overflow, and they had to descend at least a thousand feet to reach the shore, so that was unlikely, it would never overtop and deposit the water behind.</p><p>And, impossibly (but nothing was ever really impossible with magic), it seemed that there was a ring-shaped grove of trees surrounding the lake.</p><p>The Lake of Anahit.</p><p>Hermione tipped a salute to Larissa, who smiled faintly. The sun had not risen inside the crater, obscured by the lip of the rim. Together, they hasted down through snow, ice and scree toward the lake, Bella favouring her still-healing side.</p><p>They reached the forest. They were golden apple trees, all of them. The snow was frozen to them, the leaves were frozen on them, the apples were frozen in place, as if the snow and ice had happened suddenly, and preserved everything in a memory, a dream, of the state of summer.</p><p>Larissa paused, close to the icy shore. The first rays of dawn were threatening across the rim of the crater, producing a beam of light on the opposite rim, which was tracking and descending toward the lake. As it did, the ice and snow below it instantly melted, magically, far faster than ice and snow would ever melt normally under the sun.</p><p>Tonks exclaimed: “The veil has been lifted—both ways! The heat of the sun is interacting with the crater again. I am not even sure the Volcano is occluded anymore.”</p><p>“It has,” Hermione agreed. She turned to one of the trees, remembering a facet of the knowledge from her living dream, from the other priests and priestesses. “And the Simurgh needs to be fed,” she added, barely above a whisper. She struck her wand against the golden apple, with a warming and revivifying charm. The apple was restored to wholeness, instantly un-frozen, gleaming with warmth. It was the apple of immortality, of health, of healing.</p><p>It was the food of the Simurgh, not human beings, denied the great bird of regeneration and life for thirteen hundred years. Magical scorched Earth warfare. Elahaïs’ war against Islam – the revenge of the keepers of the Temple of Anahit. The slow and steady drying out, and loss of cropland, which had weakened the heart of the Islamic world throughout its history, exacerbated by the destruction of the Qanats by the Mongols. Once the Middle East had been far more fertile than it was today.</p><p>That was by design, to sap the strength of the followers of Muhammad and the Army of Islam. A powerful but immensely subtle magical design had turned the gardens of Babylon into dust, in a way that the Muggles would interpret as a natural progression of the desiccation of climate after the end of the last Ice Ages. But it had worked its slow, insidious magic.</p><p>Or rather, it had worked no magic at all. Some ancient and powerful gift of the almighty had made the land fertile in the first place, and perhaps created human civilisation. And Elahaïs had put it to sleep. The prize the eunuch had paid for playing Koschei so well had been the sorcerer’s fleeting grasp of immortality, nothing more.</p><p>And Hermione understood what would have to happen for her friend to live. She understood what she expected Bella’s challenge was, too. Wonderful, wonderful Bella, who was balanced between the Gate of Anahit and the Gate of Azi Dahak—between the Lake, and the Door of a Billion Stars. The Simurgh would have to fly again.</p><p>She took the apple and threw it out onto the lake as hard as she could. It landed on the ice, dozens of metres out, in the thin air which was already driving her to breathe sharp and hard.</p><p>The sun cleared the rim of the crater, and light flooded in. The ice cracked.</p><p>Everyone in their party stopped, and watched. The cracks spread, and then the sheets of ice burst up, as a glowing beak, larger than the head of a horse, appeared up from the water, and the apple vanished into it. A dim, wavering glow was visible below the water.</p><p>Like Fawkes writ large, but glowing, made of energy, of pure energy, larger than a giant, with a wingspan worthy of the Thunderbird and larger than many aeroplanes, shimmering in a thousand colours, iridescent in the dawn’s light, the Simurgh rose from the lake, the water of life cascading down in a spray, his wings beating, rising into the thin air above the mountains. Leaving behind a glowing gold trail of magical energy, flicking tail feathers to shake loose the last bit of water, his wings beating, he rose, and rose, and pirouetted happily into the air, before turning to the Northeast, and flying off at very great speed.</p><p>Hermione had dropped to her knees, and was laughing, and crying. The snow and ice had vanished from the forest. The trees were alive. The ice was vanishing from the lake. The world felt young and magical again. Magic felt <em> wonderful </em>again, as it had when she was young, at Hogwarts, before Voldemort had dragged the grotesqueness and sordid nature of the wizarding world into full light before her, and taught her that magic was only a tool which could be used for good or evil, just like the gun at her belt.</p><p>It seemed like hope returned, with the Flight of the Firebird.</p><p>But some hearts couldn’t help but feel challenged by avarice.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I borrowed the concept of an undead Room of Requirement from Zarrene Moss' "Jinx and Counter", a delightful Bellamione short-story. That it is, in a sense, undead, and how precisely it works, were my own extrapolations and inferences.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0050"><h2>50. Five Minutes Before the Door of a Billion Stars.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>I thought I was going to reach the "intermezzo" and finish this arc at this chapter, but it just required more detail and effort than I had anticipated... So, next chapter, instead. Meanwhile, enjoy!</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The peace of the Simurgh’s flight was magical. Even in its wake, it made those who had witnessed it ebullient. The little party settled down by the shore of the lake in the sun. Larissa was laughing, blue eyes bright, as if she had released a great weight upon her shoulders. Hermione was actually feeling like she might be able to put what had just happened to her, behind her.</p><p>For all that, it didn’t change everything. In the midst of the celebration, Bella slipped into the orchard. The others barely noticed to begin remarking upon it when she reemerged where the others sat, munching on a golden apple. “Triumph,” she said before them all, raising it to the air for a moment, before taken another bite. “We passed the test, and these are the fruits of victory.”</p><p>There was a momentary feeling of unease. Hermione couldn’t exactly say what it was, but she could clearly see that at least Larissa and Luna also felt it. It was a distinct feeling of wrongness. She also felt, intellectually, that Bella had very much <em>not </em>passed the test yet.</p><p>“Bella… I thought you were going to be careful?”</p><p>“I was. Nothing stopped me. I passed the test in the eunuch’s dreams, I’m quite well done with waiting. Now – now I will be fully healed. There are plenty of apples for the Simurgh.”</p><p>Luna quietly got up from the circle they’d formed. “I shall be performing a divination,” she said shortly, and stepped away.</p><p>Bellatrix watched her for a moment, and then shrugged, and sat down. With the sun warming them—indeed, the temperature in the crater seemed unnaturally warm for the extreme altitude—they could remain much longer at high altitude than one normally could with their limited amount of gear.</p><p>Tonks looked at Hermione and shook her head slowly. They both knew it was dangerous. But, on the other hand, Koschei had lived centuries because of the Apples, nourished by the Water of Life. Unspoken between them was how close Bella and Hermione were. In the circumstances, Tonks seemed to have put it aside.</p><p>Looking back to the woman she had fallen in love with, Hermione breathed slowly. There was a golden twinkling of little dust-motes around Bellatrix. She sat, with her eyes closed and her legs crossed, looking, by Bella’s standards, actually quite content. They all were staring. Of course they were.</p><p>Hermione watched it happen before her eyes. The wrinkles disappeared, the patina of dusted age on her—the legacy of Azkaban, the hardship of a life on the run, of a life in prison—faded away. Her skin tightened. Her hair grew, if anything, even more curly Raven-dark luscious. But Bellatrix did not get <em>younger. </em> She still had the essential air of <em>maturity </em>in her appearance. She was still a woman in her fifties. She was just absolutely as perfect as a woman in her fifties could be, healed of all the cruelties that life had done to her body, except for the age itself. It was an amazing transformation, but a subtle one. It was like Bellatrix, living all the years she had lived, had nonetheless had the chance to go back and live them, in perfect gentleness, health, and strength, making every decision right to preserve herself, every choice of diet and consequences to reflect a supremely healthy witch, at an age when a witch could still be very beautiful, for a witch could live for more than a century with ease.</p><p>The golden motes vanished from around her, even as there were more than a few gasps of surprise, at the results of eating the apple which Bella had just enjoyed. Bella opened her eyes, and looked around at them all, her expression turning into a grin of triumph. “So how much younger am I?”</p><p>“Well, it’s… It’s that everything, well, it <em>healed </em>you,” Hermione tried to explain, and then sucked in her breath.</p><p>Bellatrix’s expression froze. “What’s that supposed to mean?”</p><p>“It’s quite younger, but, the damage, it’s gone,” Hermione didn’t want to say Bella was pretty—in fact, she had been almost unbearably beautiful even before—not because it wasn’t true, because now she <em>was </em>unbearably beautiful, but because it would probably enrage Bella.</p><p>Bellatrix’s eyes flashed dangerously. Now, she pulled the glove off, but her golden hand was still there. She was so used to it that, in fact, she had to look at her own hand to see that it had not been healed, and her expression froze, and she stared it. <em>“DAMN IT! DAMN IT ALL!</em>” The dark witch erupted into anger, leaping to her feet. “Did it do nothing at all? I can still feel it! I can still feel it!”</p><p>“Aunt, look at yourself in a mirror! You know it did something!” Tonks leapt to her feet, intervening.</p><p>Hermione did, too, and approached Bellatrix, just for the older woman to push her way. “Damnit, I wanted these years back! I wanted my life in Azkaban back! DAMN IT ALL! It’s not looks, it’s <em>Azkaban! It’s Azkaban!</em>” She spun around, and ran, into the groves of the apple trees, and as she did, Hermione could swear that she saw the woman crying.</p><p>It made her heart plunge. The apples could not give her what she wanted. They had healed most of her physical deteoriation—all of it which was not magical. But magical wounds and psychiatric trauma? Where was their magical remit for this? In fact, the Water of Life healed bodies. Bella should have never gotten her hopes up.</p><p>But that scarcely mattered to the feelings of sympathy and pain that Hermione had, for the sake of the fact that Bellatrix had pinned her hopes on being remade anew here, and now faced them not coming true. There was no easy way out for her. The woman she loved would have to face a future in which her past remained true, in which the waves of Azkaban never were wiped clean from her soul.</p><p>And somewhere out in the grove was Bellatrix, on the top of the mountain, in the middle of the caldera, with enemies threatening them, and with no contact with the outside world. Hermione wearily turned back to the camp. “I hope … I hope she’ll return when she calms down. Oh God, I hope so badly.”</p><p>But right before she reached it, she changed her mind, and turned back.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix Black walked through the orchard alone, ignoring the countless golden apples dangling there, tempting her. Instead, she glanced again, and again, at the golden hand that marked her artificial left arm. She had abandoned her glove at the camp, and was forced to stare at the reminder of her amputation with each time she dared to glance down.</p><p>Pain, pleasure, sensation, they were all transmitted the same. It didn’t have the play or give of a normal hand of flesh… But she couldn’t help but think of the wild ways Hermione had responded to the crisp leather of a good glove on it when they had sex.</p><p>Finding the side of the lake hard-by part of the orchard, she cast a quick spell, and watched as the water of life, so tempting, but now feeling so futile, turned to a perfect glassy surface in front of her. It was true, then. The apple had given her a fine level of health and vigour, healed her body. But it could not give her back the years. She felt a great and terrible bitterness.</p><p>There was a small hope, however; it might keep the years off. That would be worth it, in its own way; a consolation prize. <em>To control the path to the orchard means to eat of it whenever I please. I can least live as long as Koschei did, or longer, if I am not such a fool. </em>This was what Voldemort had truly wanted, too. As it was, he would live forever, but fade more and more with the years, his power waning, his body growing more wizened. These apples would preserve him in his prime forever.</p><p><em>That </em>temptation passed in a heartbeat. There was no going back. Going back meant, ultimately, the betrayal and death of Cissy, of Andy, of Draco, and yes, of Tonks. And sooner or later, Voldemort would kill her, even if he decided he needed her initially.</p><p>
  <em>And Hermione. Don’t forget Hermione. </em>
</p><p>She grimaced, and stared again down at the water, her hair floating with an errant breeze, crazy and unkempt around her from the adventures of the past two days. She had not slept in close to thirty-six hours, but seemed so energetic, so awake, from the effects of the Golden Apple. She couldn’t even think of wanting alcohol, whereas before it had grown close to her heart. Perhaps addiction, too, had been healed, and that, at least, gave her a brief pause, a smile at the thought of forcing Hermione to eat a slice and freeing her from the Muggle cancer-sticks.</p><p><em>Delphini needs her mother. </em>A dark thought crossed her, a solution to the problem of Voldemort, a solution that had been presented by Hermione herself.</p><p>Quietly, Bellatrix stepped back from the lake. She imagined the Simurgh would return with the evening’s sun, if all the legends in the Persian books of magic she had read were correct. Those same legends told her what she needed to know about the mountain, as well. Forcing herself to look at the golden hand again, Bella turned and walked back into the dense orchard. She looked up, and grew still. She could see what looked like a tiny grotto temple, set into the wall of the caldera. A figure had just stepped into it.</p><p>Someone who was not in uniform, but instead in black.</p><p>Bellatrix reached for her wand, and started out toward the location. With columns that were marked by terrible twisting masses of serpents, she had some idea that, perhaps, she had found the other path—the path of Azi Dahaka. Now the question was who had taken advantage of it, assuming she had even see anything at all. With that came a certain lust, an envious thought: <em> They have found the path before me. </em></p><p>The lust came from a dark thought in her heart, and it was the reason she did not summon help from the others. <em> Perhaps, with what is below here, I could defeat Voldemort myself. </em>It was not the first time she had thought of this, for the problem of defeating Voldemort was the one which kept her up at night, with fear for what the true ending of her family would be, with fear that all of their victorious would in the end be for naught. After all, no-one could defeat Voldemort; he could not be killed. Both the boys who might have done the deed were dead and buried, could not return to the land of the living. But the prophesy was only a prophesy of Earth. From all that she had read, Azi Dahaka was of another power entirely, and one that could be grasped carefully, by a Witch or Sorcerer strong enough to do the work. He was not a demon, after all, but a man who had been changed by one.</p><p>Perhaps, she could end the war in an afternoon, and they would all be safe—Delphi, Cissy, Andy, Draco, Tonks—and, yes, Hermione.</p><p>With the grace of a predator, she slipped down into the heart of the mountain.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>With a ripple, the entrance deposited her deeper into the mountain than a simple cave. Like a port-key, the old stone gate had let her <em>descend. </em>Her fury and bitterness kept her from fear, and if there were more enemies, well, the greater the challenge, the greater the triumph. Only a small part of her suggested, in her anger, tried to remind her, that perhaps she had not passed the test. Perhaps she had just set herself up to be confronted with the rest of it.</p><p>The chamber was completely dark, and Bellatrix carefully cast a spell to allow her to see without it, without giving off her own light. The hewn rock, set with ashlar columns, seemed incomparably ancient. There was writing, pictograms, on the walls; whether or not they were magical rooms, Bellatrix could not immediately say, for they were also incomparably ancient, older than anything of rune work she had known. <em>As old as Atlantis… </em></p><p>Footfalls ahead. Bellatrix muffled her own with another spell and moved out, hugging the wall on one side.</p><p>She turned a corner, and inset in the ceiling, black opals glittered like dark stars, an evil tapestry of beauty above them. Gems which could only be found in Australia, from an age when it was unknown.</p><p>Her wand's magic blocked the first disarming spells, that came abruptly from the group of wizards in front of her. The flare of the magic seemed deadened and dampened in the chamber. Alecto. Amycus.</p><p>Dolohov.</p><p>Three Death Eaters.</p><p>For a moment, Bellatrix blocked them all. <em>They expected me. </em>Her eyes narrowed and she grimaced at her own foolish fury. Of course they had expected her.</p><p>“My, my, you’re looking well. Treason prospers, it seems,” Antonin Dolohov stepped forward, his wand arcing and crackling with magical energy against Bellatrix’s. “Of course, it was really that you just couldn’t resist a magic apple, Bella.”</p><p>“You’ve been to the top yourself,” Bella answered, now straining under the attacks of the three. It was then that she saw it, the thing which gave her pause. A perfectly square door, which seemed carved of a single block of obsidian, and yet was perfectly smooth, set in finely dressed ashlars for a frame. <em>The Door. </em>She dug her boots in and leaned against the far wall. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t indulge, yourself!”</p><p>“I’m here for something else,” Dolohov answered with a smirk, and with a furious fusillade of spells, drove Bella back to the wall—and finally, with the Carrows joining in jinxes from one flank—he undercut Bella with a spell. She fell forward with a sharp intake of air, and braced herself. Oh, yes, she knew in that moment what Dolohov intended to do.</p><p>He turned toward The Door, and whatever spell was incomplete there, or whatever incantation he had learned… His wand flicked.</p><p>A crack appeared. A sea of stars… With shadowy, inky, blackness yawing over them. Bellatrix felt an inestimable force grab her and drag her onwards.</p><p>“I am most sorry, Bella, but you see, you <em>haven’t </em>betrayed Our Lord, not effectively,” Dolohov said, with a reverent fascination in his voice. “We’re not here to give Him <em>apples. </em>We’re here to give him the Portal of Xešm. Not even you, nor any of us, understood what the <em>Rabdos </em>of Koschei the Deathless was really for, until He chose to reveal it to us.”</p><p>What looked like a <em> tendril, </em> made of pure blackness, began to shift, and move through the door. Dolohov stopped talking. Bella, casting spell after spell to try and haul herself back, for a moment held her ground. She could feel an Intelligence pressing around her, and a whisper of a promise on the wind: <em> Give me your life, and I will give you mine. </em>It echoed through her mind with enormous power, battered down her ability to resist. It promised her the world, if she gave it souls.</p><p>A chill horror swept through her. No, she would not cut a deal with this monstrous thing, this monster-worse-than-nightmare. It was too much like the torment of Azkaban. Better oblivion, than submission. She prepared to face the end.</p><p>A crisp set of boots on stone. The rustle of a coat.</p><p>A magical lasso shot out, wrapped itself firmly around Bella, and dragged her back toward the side. Hermione stood there.</p><p>In the darkness, sad, desperate, determined—perhaps the mudblood was never lovelier than we she had something to fight for. Another part of her mind cursed at the ingrained impulse. <em> Hermione. Hermione. Hermione! Say her name, even if it’s the last time! </em>"HERMIONE!"</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Priestesses of Anahita were not taught the full secrets of the depths of this, the True Damawand, the True Ararat. But they were taught enough. Hermione’s memories spanned only three days, when the Temple was preparing for its own destruction; she had learned but a little. Still, she knew enough: The cosmic horror on the other side of The Door was unfathomable, but the system of power, given life by the water of the Goddess, that held it in place—it was a formidable working. Hermione’s knowledge was limited, and the options that the Priestesses of old had recorded were not pleasant ones.</p><p>In that darkness, in the sense of despair in the air, though, Hermione felt something familiar. The reek of pleasure in despair, of satisfaction in Hell, of the <em>end </em>of all human satisfaction. The reek of something that preferred nightmares to desolation.</p><p>
  <em>If Azi Dahaka had not made himself the Dark King, then Xešm himself would have spilled out to establish his own reign of the world. Thus said the prophecy. </em>
</p><p>But in Bella's call, she found the ready courage to face what was perhaps the greatest evil in all the Cosmos. Her wand was out and singing, slinging magic as it whistled through the air. But facing the Carrows and Dolohov was nothing—a piff-poff to the side of the real threat. Bellatrix was being driven toward the Door, and she had no defence.</p><p>But Hermione just might. Weaving a complicated shield that required her to sidestep toward Bella, she called out “Hang on!” to the dark witch, and then raised her wand once more, bringing forth her happiest memory. “<em>EXPECTO PATRONUM!”</em></p><p>It didn’t work. A few flickers of silver burst from her wand, and nothing more.</p><p>The Carrows started to laugh, mocking her. Dolohov was more of a professional; he attacked, and forced her back, away from Bellatrix, as a whisper of the movement of that tendril nearly touched her boot. Hermione, in a flash from the corner of her eye, saw real fear in Bella’s eyes.</p><p>
  <em>Why… Why can’t I? </em>
</p><p>Those memories of the past held no more pleasure for Hermione Granger. But Bella was about to die, or, in fact, suffer something worse than death.</p><p>She rocked about on her heels. In raw desperation, in a foundering last flicker of hope, she thought back to Oslo, and the wild kisses, the sheer happiness, she shared with Bella as they shared the vinyl, the lush sounds of music they both loved.</p><p>The Carrows were not ready for her to succeed. <em>“Expecto Patronum</em>!”</p><p>Her Otter joined the battle, and rushed forward, as if she knew exactly what was needed, to interpose herself between the tendril of some fate beyond Hell, and Bella. The collision of the two produced a violent flare of silver sparks, like nothing in a battle of a Patronus and a Dementor that Hermione had ever seen. Even the Death Eaters were distracted in surprise.</p><p>Hermione’s Patronus <em>whimpered, </em>like the Otter had suffered pain; but she stood firm, just as Hermione did, making block and parry in turn with Dolohov.</p><p>But the Tendril whipped back, recoiling, and turned away from Bellatrix. It started to skitter across the room, expanding, growing, continuing to advance through the door—but now toward the Death Eaters.</p><p>She was confronted with the fact that the door was already opened. There was no way to close it, except for those two terrible fates that the stories of her three days in the past had taught her, of the days of Rustam. A fate worse than death was demanded, and there were two kinds. There was the living annihilation—this was what Azi Dahaka had taken upon himself, claiming it was necessary to keep the demon <em>Xešm</em> from destroying the world. That was unthinkable. To Hermione, and, she prayed, to Bella.</p><p>The second one was a sacrifice, plain and simple.</p><p>Well, the demon Xešm was currently coming out of the Door and the Death Eaters themselves did not seem to appreciate that any one of them could be what Azi Dahaka had been. Perhaps not even Voldemort had realised it. Hermione had a second to make up her mind; for, there was one other way to do this. The tendril was growing larger. Soon, there would be a threat not just to her and Bella, but to the whole world.</p><p>
  <em>I am condemning a man to a fate worse than death. </em>
</p><p>Hermione’s wand flicked out, another complex block that bought her time. Then she pivoted from Dolohov, too smart and skilled to be taken in by this, and even from Alecto, and turned to the weakest of the three—her brother. Somewhere inside of Hermione, she mustered the hardness to kill, and to do worse than kill, when cruel necessity unfolded before her.</p><p>The second spell she flung sent Amycus Carrow off his feet and flying for the door. He had been hanging back during the fight, his usual cowardice and caution, and it might have been the only reason that Bellatrix was alive for Hermione to rescue, but Hermione could afford not even the thought of mercy now. His body intersected with the tendril of nightmare, and in a single truly awful moment, flashed into black, haloed in white light, and then vanished.</p><p>The door snapped closed.</p><p>Bella flew to her side with the residual energy of the lasso, as Alecto Carrow’s face turned into shock, horror, nightmarish fury, the tidal wave of emotions which came from watching your sibling die in front of your face.</p><p>Hermione snapped back toward Dolohov—but it was too late. It was not her efforts that saved her life, but Bella’s.</p><p>Bellatrix stretched out and kicked Hermione, just in time. As the young witch went down, Dolohov’s killing curse blasted into the ashlars behind her, and sent one crashing down on Hermione’s back; but the quick, physical move had saved her life, with Hermione utterly focused on the act which had closed the Door right up until the moment the ashlars tumbled into her with the fury of the killing curse’s near miss to the wall.</p><p>Hermione felt overwhelming pain from the blow, but Bellatrix kicked herself up from the rubble with her wand flashing, and grabbing Hermione, she dragged her back, back toward the portal to the caldera, as fast as she could. “You wouldn’t let me die, I won’t let you die, pet!” Bella screamed as she dragged Hermione along, acting with an impossible strength for her short form, built of raw adrenaline and desperation.</p><p>A ghost of a smile came to Hermione’s lips. “Mmmn. Y’look beautiful.”</p><p>Finally freeing her wand from defensive spells, as Hermione jerked through a few inept casts of <em> Protego </em>while being dragged, Bellatrix managed to cast a lightening charm, and slung Hermione in a fireman’s carry, still fighting with her wand.</p><p>Hermione, dazed, and in a kind of pain which only the <em>crucio </em>had ever exceeded, was grinning as the ancient port-key portal flung them back to the caldera, her face flushed and taut with pain, cold sweat streaking down her body, deep in shock. But with two hands—one gold and one living flesh—Bella carried her down to the camp.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>“Tonks, get ready, we’re about to be attacked. And Hermione’s badly wounded!” Bellatrix called as soon as she could see them, a quick spell with a wand dangling from her hand, with the emotion behind it, still sufficient to amplify her voice to carry.</p><p>Credit given where it was due, Tonks sent out a warning signal in the hopes that the armed ferry and the troops on shore could see it, an arching exploding star generated by her wand. Then she turned out the rest of the party in a defensive formation.</p><p><em>She’s got the parts of a Black that matter, </em>Bella decided with a sniff. Andromeda’s daughter was worthy of Andromeda, and … And being her niece.</p><p>“Come on,” Bella whispered to Hermione as she thought these things and carried her onwards, down to the shore of the lake. “Not much longer and we’ll have you mended right up.”</p><p>Bellatrix, after all, had a simple and practical plan. The moment she had deposited Hermione within the protective circle of their comrades, she turned for one of the trees.</p><p>“Bellatrix!” Tonks exclaimed. “We still don’t know yet what plucking the apples will <em>do.</em>”</p><p>“Niece,” Bellatrix shrugged far more mildly. “Let me teach you a well-learned and very true pureblood lesson: Don’t dither when the circumstances require action! We will shortly be attacked by forces of strength unknown, and the stakes are the world itself!” She reached the tree, and plucked the apple, and turned back toward Hermione, her eyes flaring, her hair waving like a raven banner behind her.</p><p>“What do you mean?” Tonks looked past Bellatrix, toward the direction from whence she had come with Hermione.</p><p>“<em>Merlin, </em>but there’s a <em>Hell </em>of a lot more in the bottom of this mountain. The top may be the Lake of Anahit. The bottom? Well,” She shivered and shuddered, visibly, at what she had seen through the Door, at what had offered her power.</p><p><em>Did I only reject it because of what it was? Otherwise, would the temptation have been overwhelming? </em>Bellatrix knelt, and gave the golden apple to Hermione. “Eat, and eat well, pet, because I think your back is broken.”</p><p>“What <em>was it, </em>Bellatrix?” Tonks stepped closing, watching the two other women together, and shaking her head.</p><p>“...I…” Bellatrix trailed off, the hesitation genuine, turning away from Hermione once she was content she had swallowed her bites of the apple.</p><p>Bellatrix knew her expression was making Tonks’ blood run cold, but there was no other way to describe what she had seen, heard, and felt, even as it brought ice to her veins.</p><p>“The God of the Dementors,” the dark witch finished softly, her entire form dripping with a kind of detached despair, and watched her niece go as pale as ice.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0051"><h2>51. The Lake of Anahit</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Lake of Anahit</b>
</p><p> </p><p>The statement made a slow chill fall over the group. But Tonks rallied, shook her head, and stiffened up straight. “Well, that means it’s just more important for us to win, General Black.” She paused, for a moment, and then added, softly: “Thank you for bringing Hermione back. I’d feel awful if she died because of this scheme.”</p><p>“Aren’t you a soldier, to be prepared to sacrifice anyone and anything for the cause?”</p><p>“Well, I bury it deep inside,” niece said to aunt, “but I still feel it, anyway. Do you want my confession? Sometimes, I envy the way you Death Eaters seem to kill so easily, and without consequences. It would have made defeating you so much easier to be able to do the same. And perhaps I’ve tried my hardest, because winning is more important than my soul, at this point.”</p><p>Bellatrix thought back to the Door, and shuddered. “But not everything. It’s not worth everything.”</p><p>“I admit, I never thought I’d hear you say something like that.”</p><p>“Well, Tonks, I never thought I’d be <em>here.</em>” Bellatrix turned around, and walked back to Hermione’s side, watching. Glowing magical dust-motes surrounded her, and their presence made Bella feel relief. <em>Hermione is healing, then. Just a little bit longer. </em>Skin baked hard brown under the sun of years of campaigning, balanced by a cute set of even darker freckles which accentuated her features. Brown eyes eyes looking up with growing lucidity as the pain was banished. Frizzy hair which escaped the confines of the pins that Hermione was keeping it in regulation with, to expand behind her and rest on the grass next to the shore.</p><p>Bellatrix knelt at Hermione’s side, and leaned down. “Why, pet, were you such a damned fool?”</p><p>“I had to save your life.”</p><p>Bellatrix laughed darkly, tamped a hand into the grass. Hermione wanted to save her life. She opened her mouth to speak, but Bella’s words died in her throat, with Draco’s warning.</p><p>“Hostiles, on the rim!”</p><p>The magical dust-motes vanished from around Hermione, and Bellatrix leapt to her feet, and extended her gold left hand to the younger woman. In the midst of it all, she’d forgotten to bother to retrieve her glove. Somehow, it didn’t seem like so much of a problem anymore.</p><p>There were seventeen of them. They descended on brooms, rushing down, having used them to gain the caldera. Their wands were out and flinging spells, but neither Antonin nor Alecto were among them.</p><p>Bellatrix positioned herself just in time for the two to arrive through the orchard, Alecto rushing headlong with murder in her eyes. Her spells met Bella’s shields and the older Dark Witch checked the younger with a sharp set of sweeps of her wand, economical motions that called forth a complicated, fractal shield that held its position long enough to send magical energy ricocheting across the field like a madhouse in front of the Black scion.</p><p>Dolohov hung back a little bit, observed the situation, and <em>then </em>attacked, where it would do the most good for his cause. Bellatrix was quickly locked into a duel with him in which Alecto’s furiously angry attacks interposed themselves as a random element which kept driving her back and leaving her off guard. By herself Alecto would have been trivial for Bellatrix to deal with, particularly when she was so worked up as she was now. Dolohov was a respected duellist, and would have been a real challenge.</p><p>The two together were certainly a threat—particularly with how <em>unpredictable </em>Alecto’s (and was she ever aptly named at that moment) fury was. But Bella was in her element fighting. She was a battle witch, aptly named. What other skills had she ever had? Her adult life had been war, fighting, terrorism, torture. She had mostly served Voldemort, but turn her coat, and the skills were the same. Only music and her research into the wild intersection of magic and electricity served as a distant dream of an age when that might have been different. She was here, she was now, she was Bellatrix, she was the War-Woman.</p><p>Spinning and twirling to a music in her own head, the skirt of uniform and her jacket swirling, buttons in the sun. It was a far cry from Wizarding robes, but Bella had never been much for those. Her shields turned away blow after blow. She knew that Alecto wanted past her to kill Hermione, and this, Bella would not permit. The sun burned down sharply upon her from straight above. It was high noon, and in the thin area, the radiation of the sun across her bare skin could be <em>felt, </em>but the warming intensity was pleasant in the thick of the fight. The shadows that cast as she spun on the attack danced across the bright grass, and at least on the defensive, she handled herself so well that it seemed like she could hold off her two attackers forever.</p><p>But nor could Bellatrix find it within herself to craft an attack that would peel Alecto away from Dolohov. Though it had been in a jail cell, and for only a few weeks, they had shard an intimacy which still lingered for Bellatrix, for all of her fury toward Alecto at her betrayal of the Dark Lord. Once, twice, thrice, she passed up the opportunity to deliver a killing blow. It was a dangerous lassitude in her normally lethal duelling technique.</p><p>Around her little duel, the whole of the battle raged. To be honest, the skilled battle wizards and witches who Dolohov had brought on this mission probably exceeded Alecto, though the formidable Death Eater was another matter entirely, but Bellatrix certainly had her fair share of the enemy force; the reality, though, was that eleven on five was what the rest were up against, and numbers counted, even if she was removing Dolohov from the equation of the fight. Quickly, two more battle wizards of the Morsmordre joined the attack on her, for their compatriots had the number of the rest of her team, and in doing so, they finally pressed her hard.</p><p>Then Alecto charged in close. “Traitor! Bitch! Filthy mud-blood lapping whore! <em>This </em>is what you gave yourself, Bella?!” Her words were sharp exhalations in the middle of exertion as she twice tried to cut a <em>sectumsempra </em>through Bella’s shields.</p><p>Both times, Bellatrix ignored the counterattack. She didn’t want to say a single thing to Alecto. She didn’t love her. But something deep inside of the pit of her stomach stayed her hand from striking down a woman she had fucked. Even in prison, under such pretences.</p><p>The terrible blow of a <em> sectumsempra </em>fell against her. But it didn’t fall from Alecto. It was Dolohov, taking advantage of the situation. “Ach, so much drama on the battlefield…”</p><p>“<em>Avada Kedav--</em>” Alecto began the spell to finish Bellatrix off, but she never finished it.</p><p>“<em>Sectumsempra</em>!” It was an explosive force, a perfectly formed spell, grown large with the intensity behind, and driven well into Alecto, by a powerful and skilled wand technique. It tore through her like a Kodiak Max grizzly bear mauling her face and her chest; in fact, this iteration of the cutting spell was awful, much worse than the blow Bella had just suffered from Dolohov.</p><p>Alecto Carrow might be alive, but for how much longer, was an open question. Bella knew who had done it, of course. There was a smile of satisfaction on her lips as she dragged herself to her feet, with her uniform in bloody rags, and made again to fight.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione Granger watched her victim fall. Her second victim of the day, and from the same family. <em>Sectumsempra </em> was a fig-leaf of not really meaning to kill, but that was all it was, a fig leaf. It was a more murderous spell than a gunshot would be. She turned immediately from Alecto, sparing only a passing thought. <em>I don’t think it was so bad that Bella was unable to take her out. </em></p><p>It had been.. Humanising. Bella had <em>cared, </em> even when the moment was long gone. It had <em>weakened </em>her.</p><p>The weakness was a reason to fight for her. Hermione turned on Dolohov and launched the attack again, but Dolohov met it strongly with a good shield. “You have barely even weakened me—she was just a distraction!” He mocked Hermione. “And you’re no Bellatrix Black, mudblood. You’re just a pathetic bitch, waiting to cry while she carves up your arm.”</p><p>Hermione stiffened at the remark. <em>Fuck him. </em> That held no power over her, she <em>chose </em> that. Hermione spared the briefest glance to make sure that Bella was retreating, but say that instead of falling back inside their perimeter, she was making for the shore of the lake itself. <em>Of course she is. </em></p><p>Ignoring, because there were far more pressing things, the relative wisdom of drinking directly of the Water of Life, she fought Dolohov blow for blow, and trusted that Bellatrix would, if she could, reenter the fight again as soon as she could.</p><p>“By the way, before we go much further, <em>Colonel </em>Granger, I thought you should know your friends are in a hopeless position.”</p><p>“Doesn’t seem like it to me,” Hermione answered, refusing to turn and look.</p><p>“Well, I just fix that,” Dolohov smirked, and broke away from his attack pattern behind a strong shield long enough to whisper another, different spell.</p><p>A horrifying scream echoed behind Hermione. It was Draco’s voice.</p><p>“Fucking traitors shouldn’t decide to be heroes, too; it will pay them back, eventually,” Dolohov mused, as a confident smirk marked the resumption of a furious attack.</p><p>Hermione dug her feet in, and counterattacked. She had spent, like Draco, four years in this uniform. They both knew the risks. There was only one thing to do when the situation was hopeless—attack. And so, with her wand in one hand, pushing Dolohov as hard as she could, she complicated the picture for him, flipping her pistol out and spraying bullets in his general direction.</p><p>With a smirk, he sent them flinging to the side. But suddenly, the sound of the gun firing sounded far more furious, far louder, as the beats echoed around the rim of the caldera.</p><p><em>That isn’t a gun, </em>Hermione realised suddenly.</p><p>And Dolohov barely survived turning to face the gunfire.</p><p>The Galina from the ferry had just crested the rim of the caldera, leering like a metal croc even as it struggled to remain airborne. There was no way that it should be flying at the top of a 6,000 metre mountain, and indeed, it was barely flying. Hermione saw the landing gear slap down as it struck rocks over the top of the caldera, and wanted to hold her breath as the tail rotor barely cleared, dust and gravel flying. But ground effect was a little bit of technical magic in the hands of the stalwart pilot. As it descended the caldera at low speed, she then wanted to cheer, and she wanted to cheer harder when Zoë the Palmyran lunged down from it, landing in mid-stride, and immediately flung a <em>Bombarda </em>at one of the Morsmordre wizards from behind, the shrapnel from blasted rocks overcoming his shielding technique.</p><p>Barely flying, the Mi-24 was still dangerous, too, and then the pilot proved it. As he crested the ridge, his twin Gsh-30-2 30mm automatic cannon tore across the battlefield. Dolohov barely managed to protect himself from being blasted apart by the surprise arrival of the helicopter’s gunfire.</p><p>Hermione weaved away, and took advantage of his distraction to cast a spell which sent bright red cardinals flocking around the attacking Morsmordre wizards. Then she spun back, and renewed the attack on Dolohov.</p><p>The helicopter pilot triggered his rocket pods, understanding the unique but still clear target designation he had just been given. The scream of the rockets, the explosions across rock and dirt, tearing through the garden of Anahit, war in the heavens, war above hell. War on the Mountain.</p><p>The wizards were ready for him by that point, though. They shielded and defended themselves, and all of the power of muggle technology was unavailing. A moment later, Hermione despite her best efforts, failed to defend the helicopter, too, and down it went, slamming into the ground, rotor spinning, destroying itself, tail rotor ripping off, sliding down the slope in a pile of rubble.</p><p>But that attack had opened one of the Morsmordre wizards up, and Larissa took him down with a spell from which he did not rise. The daring and reckless high altitude operation had, in the end, done all it could hope for, a machine for a wizard—and, in fact, it had done just a little bit more.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The Water of Life hitting her stomach had healed Bellatrix of her wounds immediately. In a spinning feeling of warmth, disorienting but powerful, the cuts which Dolohov’s spell had delivered had vanished, and she felt a renewed surge of youthful vigour through her form, the same thing that had led her to hope before that she would be younger.</p><p>As the feeling faded, she reoriented herself and prepared to enter the fight, just to hear that scream. With a snap, she looked for her nephew, the nephew to whom she had taught Occlumency, so long ago. The nephew who, weeks before, she’d left holding Hermione’s goose in Norway.</p><p>The nephew who was the pride and joy of her sister’s heart in this terrible war.</p><p>The nephew who, sometimes a coward, had developed a quiet bravery of a man who is finally confronted with the realisation that there was no other choice.</p><p>The nephew with the Dark Mark on her left arm just like her’s had been.</p><p>The nephew she now spotted, with his left arm in flames, burning him alive from the arm up.</p><p>Stumbling in the sand on the shore, she fell into the water, fumbled with the lid to her canteen, let the smallest measure of water pour in, and ran headlong across the field. Twice, thrice, four times she had to block spells from the Morsmordre wizards attacking them, but she got to Draco’s side, as he rolled to put out a fire that would not stop burning, thanks to some curse which Dolohov had directed against him.</p><p>Reaching her nephew’s side, Bellatrix spared a moment’s glance to reassure herself that Hermione was still in the fight, in her duel against Dolohov, and then pressed the canteen to Draco’s lips. At the same time as she did, she had an idea, and directed her wand against his burning arm, casting what was normally a spell of the dark arts—one which would flay someone alive. A small cast, a moderate direction, she controlled it against his arm only.</p><p>He didn’t scream, showing already what the horrifying damage was, as the spell cleaned away the charred remnants of his skin. Then the Water of Life acted from within him, and regenerated his arm, the golden dust motes forming around it.</p><p>Bellatrix rose to her feet, flinging spells, now to cover both Luna, the closest other witch on their side--who was in a hard fight against two wizards--and herself.</p><p>When Draco’s arm healed, the young man looking at it in awe, the Dark Mark was <em>gone. </em></p><p>Bellatrix looked at her own golden arm, and crying in bitter rage, turned to attack the enemy all the harder. “Come on, Draco! Once more unto the breach!” Aunt and nephew fought together.</p><p>Their return to the fight would have evened up the odds no matter what else happened. They had local superiority: It went from two wizards against one to three against two when Bellatrix and Draco joined Luna. They actually managed to overpower and take out one of the two Morsmordre wizards, forcing the other to retreat, when the sound of gunfire and a furious increase in the number of spells slung came from the left of their defensive perimeter.</p><p>Two MinKol wizards were spearheading an attack by a VDV platoon. Bellatrix saw more of them coming in, too, using HAHO parachutes. <em> The helicopter was a diversion! </em> The response sent to Tonks’ emergency signal had been some of the big transports, deploying a special response force with specialist steerable HAHO—High-Altitude, High-Opening—parachutes, and then the VDV men had glided in, staying close to the altitude of the mountain the entire time. That meant that the Morsmordre wizards inside of the caldera lacked the line of sight to see them until they crested the ridge—and the Galina’s attack had provided the perfect diversion to keep them from being noticed while the first wave deployed into combat formation.</p><p>Bella grinned maniacally, and laughed. It was nice to be on the same side as that desperate inventiveness and utter refusal to give up. She flung herself again into the attack without hesitation. Her allies would see her flinging spell after spell in the reckless fury of the attack as they gained the day at her side. She wouldn’t have it any other way, not even on the top of Ararat.</p><p>And then Dolohov, facing Hermione blow for blow, decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and he had enough information from the situation to save his own hide before Voldemort, or whatever other calculation went through his mind. He gave the signal, and his men apparated away.</p><p>Bella felt a certain fury at the loss of her prey, as she turned to see Dolohov—to his credit, the last to apparate away—make good his escape. But as Dolohov left, there stood her Hermione, looking just as lost as Bella felt, her wand held in the midst of a spell unfinished. She was absolutely lovely.</p><p>That day, at least, they had won. Together. Only the bitter sight of her golden hand brought her back down to Earth.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>To say they were utterly exhausted was to exaggerate almost to the point of lunacy. Tonks and Luna had helped recover the fortunately still alive crew of the Galina from the crash site when the battle had ended, and the VDV medics were treating them. Neither of them were seriously wounded enough to make the witches consider suggesting that the Water of Life should be used.</p><p>To be awake for thirty-six hours, climbing to high altitude with no acclimation, fighting there for a sustained period of time, under stress, under strain--it pushed the limits of human endurance. This had been a nightmare, to the point their bodies felt like they were consuming themselves by the time they could finally eat. The instant coffee and the tea in the 24-hr Spetsnaz Mountain ration packs were drained with 20 gram packs of sugar while Hermione joined in with the others in tearing into dark chocolate bar after dark chocolate bar; each ration had 5000kcals and the troopers fortunately had extra packs considering the mission. There was processed canned cheese, and tinned meat paté after paté with crackers. Hermione was eating one labeled ‘Pork Brains, Liver and Fat’. The beef porridge and beef goulash with potatoes were coming up. They’d purified water from rivulets running down the caldera, again, treating the lake with reverence.</p><p>Tonks, Bellatrix and the VDV Major in charge of the response force had met for a while earlier, discussing the situation, and using the response unit’s radio to talk with their ship. They had not asked for her presence, and Hermione had felt too exhausted to join them voluntarily. So she chatted about stupid bullshit with the guys and ate food and drank tea and coffee until she felt somewhat revived. For some reason the urge for a cigarette wasn’t there, though she had one anyway to be companionable, but just one.</p><p>Then she went to talk to Draco. Even though Bellatrix had healed him, he was still suffering from shock. The healing had not taken out the psychological, the psycho-physical components of being burned like that, and he was only slowly recovering as his body realised he was not, in fact, horrifyingly burned in his limb and torso.</p><p>“Hey.”</p><p>“Hey, ‘Mione.” Draco looked up from a chocolate bar in his mouth, a tin cup filled with tea at his side.</p><p>“Good to see you eating, you really needed it,” Hermione offered, dropping down beside him. “At least it’s gone, cleansed in fire, and you’re not worse for the wear—right?” A mirthless wry grin seized her, feeling somewhat manic from the caffeine and lack of sleep.</p><p>“God, ‘Mione, I wish it felt like that,” he shook his head, his hands still shaking. “But I guess it’s right. Time will take care of the rest, right?”</p><p>“It will,” Hermione agreed. “And maybe, now, we’ll have enough time to count.”</p><p>“Speaking about time… ‘Mione… <em>My aunt?</em>”</p><p>“...You just couldn’t resist, could you?”</p><p>“<em>Who could.</em> You’re … You’re with her, aren’t you?”</p><p>“No. We sort of had a fling, under a lot of stress, in the Crimean and afterwards. But Tonks told me I was being an idiot and we broke up when the whole family—except you, since you were still on the front—reunited in Astana.”</p><p>“You say the whole family like you’re a part of us,” Draco remarked balefully. “And really, it seems like you’re with my aunt. You act like it.”</p><p>Hermione grimaced. “...Okay, I’ve still got feelings for her.”</p><p>“Hah, knew it!”</p><p>“...Don’t make my best friend uncomfortable, Draco,” a new voice interjected. It was Larissa, looking even more haggard than Hermione, but happy in some fundamental way. She sauntered over and dropped down to the ground alongside of them. “You alright?”</p><p>“Everyone’s worried about me…”</p><p>“With good reason, considering what I saw!”</p><p>“Alright, alright. I’m fine,” Draco answered, though a bit glumly. “Really.”</p><p>“British stiff upper lip,” Larissa muttered. “Anyway, I know why you’re twice hero now. That scream didn’t come when your arm caught fire, I saw it. It came when your arm dropped because it was burning through the tendons. You’re a <em>hero </em>in fact, not just the medals<em>. </em>Deal with it, man.”</p><p>Draco turned away with a shudder. “I don’t want to think about it, thank you; but I suppose you’re right.”</p><p>A commotion distracted them all from the conversations. Men were pointing and mumbling. In the fading light of the evening sun, the voices become more wondrous and intense. There was a glowing light in the sky, descending toward them, like a UFO.</p><p>Bellatrix and Tonks approached them, but they remained silent, as did the little knot of wizard and witches on the ground. Soon, a hushed sense of amazement spread even to the hardened veterans. The Simurgh returned from the sky, glimmering in iridescence across a hundred colours of the sunset. The great bird crested gracefully over the rim of the crater, flicked his tail feathers happily, and splashed down into the lake to disappear, with glowing lights below the surface for a moment longer, as a column of water rose up, and splashed down. A little bit of spray reached them, camped along the shore, and even grown men and soldiers laughed in a childlike glee at the feeling of being dusted with this strange water, and the golden dust-motes which danced through the air after it.</p><p>It was absolutely beautiful, and though Hermione had resisted the idea of Gods to Lord over the system and the concept of magic, in that moment, she felt the impulse to quietly kneel, and thank Anahita for her grace. The bottom of the mountain was Hell, but perhaps the little dusting of heaven at the top kept it at bay. Feeling no affection in her heart for the stoic old Methodism of her parents, she could, in that moment and that feeling, at least thank the Goddess whose lake the legends said this was.</p><p>Bellatrix looked to her, closed her eyes a moment, and then Hermione could hear her speak to Tonks, who was smiling, after all that. “So now we wait, and see if you’re right. But I want to return to the chamber, too, and find out if Elahaïs has anything to say about this, and whether or not it was her doing, or an accident of us reaching the top the hard way, or Dolohov’s doing, that the mountain became non-occluded. And what she has to say about your damned theory.”</p><p>“If you like, I think it’s wise,” Tonks agreed after a moment. “I wonder where the Simurgh went?”</p><p>Ginny came running over. “Everyone! There’s <em>wonderful news! </em>The Simurgh, the Simurgh that just returned—the Firebird!--he flew north, as far as Baku, and when he circled over the city,” her eyes were wet with tears, tears of real happiness, “the radiation levels dropped noticeably! People will LIVE because the mountain is back in touch with the world! Wherever he flew, he healed the land! <em>Magic healed radiation!</em>”</p><p>There was smiling, and nervous hopeful laughter, but Bellatrix’s lips twisted, and she glared hard at the lake, as if she desperately didn’t want it to be true.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>When they arrived the next morning, Elahaïs was smiling sweetly on the return to the chamber, and greeted them with deep bemusement. The ghost which looked, within these chambers, in every respect life-like, had the usual padded cushions for guests in the high Sassanid style. Only Tonks, Larissa, Hermione and Bellatrix had come.</p><p>“The Simurgh flew, Honoured One,” Larissa said, intensely, her eyes hooded. “Did I do my part?”</p><p>“You did—you did.” Bright, intelligent dark eyes flickered from witch to witch, but fixed quickly on Bella. “Two tests, you’ve passed.”</p><p>“There’s a <em>third?</em>” Hermione narrowed her eyes, feeling protective of Bella, especially in front of this strange ghost who had escaped the usual limitations of spectral unlife.</p><p>“Of course there is. I promised there was.”</p><p>“But—it wasn’t--”</p><p>“No, it had nothing to do with the Door,” Elahaïs shrugged languidly. “That was the second test. Well met, Bellatrix Black; there is no-one more evil in history than Azi Dahaka, who convinced himself that to keep the whole world as cattle to the Devourer was the only way to keep us from destruction. Rustam proved him wrong.”</p><p>“You don’t know my mettle, ghost,” Bellatrix bit back. “I would have been only a slave if I had accepted, and I am <em>not </em>a slave.”</p><p>“Many people have been led into many forms of slavery, usually while proclaiming they are not slaves,” the eunuch’s eyes narrowed. “But I commanded the affairs of state, magic and Armies alike, while bearing that title, and you would do well not to hold it in contempt before me. Slave you have been, but perhaps, I grant, slave you shall not again be.”</p><p>Hermione reached up to stroke a hand against Bella’s neck, under her massive cascade of black curls, trying to calm her down. She didn’t want to tempt the mind of the ghost toward anger.</p><p>“Elahaïs,” Hermione offered, “What of the occlusion of the Mountain? Why is it visible, why is it accessible again? It helped us by allowing reinforcements, but it also allowed the assault in the first place, I think.”</p><p>“It was the action of the magic of the intruders through the Dark Gate,” the eunuch replied. “I do support you occluding the mountain again, but the spell must be performed a second time, and it is no small thing. You will need a cloak of invisibility.”</p><p>Hermione and Tonks groaned in turn. “But it’s lost to Voldemort’s power!”</p><p>“You think you British had the only piece of Death’s cape?” Elahaïs laughed. “Look somewhere else. Your world is plenty big enough, if you are clever.”</p><p>“Alright,” Hermione answered, in a crestfallen reminder of how close they had come to winning the war, before the Battle of Hogwarts, before the world had been thrown to madness.</p><p>“The Simurgh,” Tonks bit her lip, refusing to let the eunuch’s words get her down; her hair shifting from pink to blue revealed her inner anxiety, but she pressed on. “Will it rise again?”</p><p>“The Simurgh always rises again.”</p><p>“But… Tomorrow?”</p><p>“Oh. No, of course not.” Elahaïs leered. “You ate apples. The rule’s simple. The Simurgh eats one apple a day. For each day someone else eats an apple, or drinks of the water of the lake, the Simurgh will not rise.”</p><p>“Four. So the Simurgh won’t rise for four days,” Hermione mused, thinking back to the events of the day before.</p><p>“But the Simurgh was healing the city of Baku,” Larissa said, softly, and thoughtfully.</p><p>“Yes, well, the Simurgh will heal and bring life to the land, just as you have restored magic to the public eye; and the faithful will worship the Simurgh, as they do now in this temple, with the restored fire. As long as the fire is burning, the Simurgh will fly, and as long as the Simurgh will fly, these lands will be reclaimed. But if you prefer to eat the apples, or drink the water of life, for your personal needs, well…” Elahaïs rose, and winked dangerously at Bellatrix. “Best ask that smart young Seer lass you were with last time about your daughter, Lady Black.” With a laugh, the eunuch began to dance, straight through the wall, until only the haunting voice carried through to them: “I doubt you’ll want to talk to me, after that…”</p><p>Elahaïs was right. Bellatrix, with a stricken expression on her face, had already leapt to her feet, and followed the eastern door out of the chamber, to face the mountain. With the mountain visible, she disapparated even as Hermione managed to scramble after her, leaving her name, “<b>BELLA!</b>” to drift empty on the wind.</p><p>Not to be undone, and definitely not to be left behind, Hermione immediately apparated after Bellatrix. She followed the dark witch in a dead run across the caldera, past confused and bemused knots of soldiers on guard, or cooking food.</p><p>Bellatrix didn’t stop until she found Luna, and flung herself at the girl, grabbing the collar of her uniform. “You saw my daughter in your divination, didn’t you!? <em>Didn’t you!? </em>The divination yesterday, speak plainly!”</p><p>Luna was the same height as Bella, and in her unusual, strange way, she didn’t seem perturbed by the knot of dark energy grabbing her so intensely. She faced the other woman and nodded slowly. “I did, General Black. I’m sorry.”</p><p>“<em>WHAT HAPPENS TO HER!?” </em>Bellatrix screamed, shaking the blonde witch.</p><p>Luna reached up and gently put her hands on Bellatrix’s hips, as if, despite the violence, she wanted to give her a hug. Hermione skittered to a stop, and paused, paling. “Bellatrix, let her go, a divineress doesn’t choose what she sees!”</p><p>“OH SHUT UP! THIS IS ABOUT DELPHINI!”</p><p>“...If you keep eating apples instead of letting the Simurgh fly, sooner or later, your daughter is going to die of radiation sickness, General Black,” Luna explained matter-of-factly. “That’s all there was to it. I’m sorry.”</p><p>“NO!” Bellatrix shrieked, and pushed Luna away, into Hermione, her eyes wild and furious. “The Gods <em>mock me</em>! They MOCK ME!” She spun away, and ran into the orchard.</p><p>“Sorry,” Hermione said hastily to her friend, and chased after Bella. “Bella! Bellatrix! Wait! Stop! I want to talk to you!”</p><p>She dashed after the older witch, who remained remarkably fit, and kept chasing her around half of the lake, dashing through the forest, brushing branches out of the way, tramping with their boots through the dew covered grass of morning, the sun peaking out above them, illuminating a caldera where, if Elahaïs told the truth, for this dawning and three more, the Simurgh would remain quiescent.</p><p>Several times, Bella stopped ahead of her, and each time, Hermione waited with baited breath. She could see Bella looking at the golden apples blossoming on the trees, but each time, either silently or with a hideous, pained shriek, Bella turned away and ran again, aimless, mad, desperate. But she never reached for an apple. She never even <em>reached </em>for one.</p><p>Finally, Bella collapsed into the dew covered grass, sobbing. Hermione reached her, and dropped to her knees in front of the other woman, without hesitation, and reached out to grab her hands. The left one was, once again, gloved. It didn’t matter; leather and flesh, that was what she held, that was what represented her lover.</p><p>“I wanted to be whole,” Bellatrix cried, her body shaking with shuddering gasps. “Damn it. Damn you, why are you even <em>here</em>?”</p><p>“Because you need me,” Hermione answered, feeling miserable at the raw agony she could see coursing through Bellatrix. “Because you need to know that I don’t need you to be younger, or prettier, than you already are. I like you exactly the way you are.”</p><p>“That’s so stupid and trite, mudblood. I’m going to turn fifty-three before the end of this year. I have a daughter. I am a mass murderer. Probably everyone still thinks I am insane behind my back. Oh, did I mention terrorist? I think muggles think that word makes you worse than a mass murderer for some stupid muggle reason, so that’s even better. You are, quite simply, doing the stupidest thing you have ever done in your little muggle-born life. Go fuck some nice Russian witch and leave me to rot.”</p><p>Hermione reached up and grabbed Bella’s face, cupping it in her hands, and pressed in for a kiss, the woman’s eyes widened; but she was unable to react, before Hermione’s lips met her’s. “How about no? So what about Delphini? She needs two parents, and though I’m young and scared shitless of the responsibility, I’ll take it on, gladly, too. Bella, you could have taken an apple and eaten it as an act of defiance about ten times while you were running, and you never did. I think you just passed the third test. Bella… You chose me over the Water of Life. That was the first test. You chose morality over an easy victory. That was the second test. And you just chose your daughter over yourself. I daresay that was the third test.”</p><p>“I almost let you <em>die </em>during the battle because I couldn’t kill Alecto,” Bellatrix gasped. “And you want to <em>love </em>me?”</p><p>“Fuck, Bella, I got your back there. I took care of it. I consider that a good thing. Test three and a half,” Hermione grinned. “I’d prefer a woman who can’t bring herself to hurt her lovers to one who can, thank you very much.” And she leaned forward, and kissed Bellatrix again.</p><p>When they parted, Bellatrix rocked back, and toppled on her back in the grass. Her hair splayed through the dew-covered grass, and laying back in it, not caring for how wet it made her in her magically repaired uniform, she tried to choke her sobs, and mostly failed. “Gods, Hermione, what fucking madness possesses you? Don’t you understand?”</p><p>“I understand fucking everything,” Hermione answered, and crawled over on top of Bellatrix, grinning a little, her uniform hanging down low, her breasts hanging down until they brushed against Bella’s, too many layers of clothes between them, but it was the thought that counted. “You need a girlfriend, and Delphi needs a second mother. Deal with it. I want you. Will you have me?”</p><p>Bellatrix drew a ragged breath, and then another. Time seemed to slow down, as she blinked her eyes open and looked up at the warm brown eyes gazing back down at her. She sniffled, and started cackling, but now, it was more with relief than a maniacal glee. “You’re as mad as I am! The kindest thing someone could call me is a hoary old bitch!”</p><p>Hermione just smiled. “But you could be mine.”</p><p>Bellatrix was overwhelmed with tears. “I don’t understand.”</p><p>“Don’t. Just don’t! There’s no need to. What’s the point? It happened. I’ve given up myself. I love you, Bella. Please. Just take me. Let’s do this.”</p><p>Laughter and tears mingled, until, finally, Bellatrix turned a serious eye to Hermione. “Pet, if you become my daughter’s second mother, I’m <em>not </em>letting you leave. She’s already lost one parent.”</p><p>“Good. I don’t intend to.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked up, silent, to her – for one breath, then four, her bosom heaving in a very distracting way below Hermione. Then she reached up, dragged the younger witch down, and kissed her again. “The.”</p><p>“Answer.”</p><p>“Is.”</p><p>“<em>yes.</em>”</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes:<br/>1. This is a 24-hr Spetsnaz Mountain Ration:<br/>https://youtu.be/lgICbOwP7NQ Yum!</p><p>Also note that, yes, the VDV does have its own Spetsnaz, in this case, the 45th Independent Spetsnaz Regiment. They would be exactly the troops trained for HAHO operations on rapid response of this type, working closely integrated with wizards from MinKol.</p><p>2. This concludes the second of the four parts of this story. It's also the thematic midpoint (the actual midpoint of the story has already passed). I hope you enjoyed where it came to, with the beginning of a true relationship between Bellatrix and Hermione. Comments are, as always, deeply appreciated, whether detailed or short.</p><p>3. Helicopters have trouble at high altitude. But the Mi-24 set a number of altitude records, and Ground Effect, where essentially back pressure from the ground keeps something airborne above its normal lift, helps a great deal, but only when you're very close to the ground. Piloting a helicopter up the side of a mountain at rotor-tip distance from the ground was, to put it mildly, a feat to be rarely equaled. </p><p>4. The mythology here is interpreted from Persian and Armenian sources, favouring the way these mythologies were historically interpreted in Russia, where many of these traditions, like the Firebird, came up from the south. I also owe some inspiration, again, to Thomas Harlan and his Oath of Empire series.</p><p>5. High Altitude, High Opening is where paratroopers are dropped at altitudes of up to 8,000 - 9,000 meters, and then open their parachutes soon afterwards, and make a controlled approach with a steerable parachute at long range. This allows high-altitude insertion and insertion at up to 40 - 60 km of cross-range. In this case by coming in close to the same height of the caldera, simple trigonometry allowed them to be invisible to the Morsmordre wizards inside the caldera, until the last moment.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0052"><h2>52. Intermezzo</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is a short "intermission" to bridge the gap between the thematic first half and thematic second half of the story, now that Hermione and Bellatrix are officially a couple. It also involves a time-skip of about three months between the events in the intermission and the events of the next chapter, which is covered in strategic terms by the intermission; but the next chapter will be extremely personally focused on Bellatrix and Hermione.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Intermezzo</b>
</p><p> </p><p>A week later, the party arrived back in Astana. There was interview after interview with the kind of quiet, professional uniformed man of the type that Colonel Kabanov had been (assuming he was a Colonel, and assuming his name was really Kabanov).</p><p>In the end, Hermione had managed to snag a few minutes with Ginny. The Weasley looked at her for a moment, glanced from side to side, and then stepped closer. <em>“Bellatrix, </em>Hermione? <em>Really</em>?” It was rather obvious the news had spread.</p><p>Hermione froze. “Ginny, I…”</p><p>“What about Harry?”</p><p>“I’ve bawled my eyes out smoking cigarettes and drinking tea and talking to him in walls about it, mostly, Ginny. I’m not forgetting Harry. But the only thing Bellatrix ever did to Harry was kill Sirius, and to be honest, Sirius was knocked into a portal to the underworld or afterlife or whatever by a spell. He didn’t die with Bella’s intent to kill him.”</p><p>“So that’s the way it’s going to be. You’re going to rationalise it. It was war, Bellatrix was just following orders.”</p><p>“She’s on our side now,” Hermione answered. “She’s done a lot to help us.”</p><p>“I…” Ginny threw her arms around Hermione and hugged her as hard as she could. “’Mione, I’m terrified she’s going to abuse you. I’m sorry, I don’t want to drive you away, I don’t want to judge you, it’s just that I don’t understand how this is healthy.”</p><p>“...Maybe it’s not, but it’s still the choice I’ve made, and it’s the choice I want to make. No hexes, no potions, just… Whatever passes for love, I guess.” Hermione smiled wryly. “I won’t ask you to respect her. I won’t ask you to be her friend, or even to be around me when she’s there, but--”</p><p>“Hermione Granger,” Ginny looked at her fiercely. “It may chill me to the bone to do it, but I’m going to be there for <em>everything </em>important in your life. If I have to deal with Bellatrix Black being your girlfriend, I’m not going to pile it on by cutting anything out, by cutting you off. I can be civil. She <em>is </em>on our side.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Hermione squeezed her friend. “Unfortunately, though, you caught me at the worst time. I do have to go.”</p><p>“With Bellatrix?” Ginny looked at her pointedly.</p><p>“...To a meeting with Her Grace, Duchess Narcissa.”</p><p>Ginny shook her head. “Well, all right. I still can’t believe that gave her that title,” she added in a hushed voice, “but <em>take care</em>!”</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>They had snagged a ZiL-41045 for the trip to Narcissa’s home along the Esil river. Bellatrix sat next to her, distracted.</p><p>“You’re thinking about seeing Delphini again, aren’t you?”</p><p>“...Yes. It’s been more than four months.”</p><p>Hermione pursed her lips and nodded. Putting herself in Bellatrix’s place, it must be terribly hard to be constantly away for so much of her daughter’s growth. She reached out, and leaned into Bellatrix.</p><p>Draco cleared his throat. “Uh… Are you going to tell Mother as soon as you get there?”</p><p>“...Should we?” Hermione bantered back.</p><p>“...I don’t think you can hide it, ‘Mione.” Draco explained with a flush. “Just a little bit worried about it.”</p><p>Bella was smirking. “Young man, you’re about to find out that your mother is far more flexible than you thought.”</p><p>Hermione felt a little bad for Draco, as they all stepped out into the first biting winds that promised a frost soon to come, in this age of abbreviated summers and long, hard, nuclear-touched winters. The last of the heat would be fleeing, especially from the open steppe, with no way to moderate its temperature, unlike the oceans. Their Army coats kept them comfortably warm, though, and it still wasn’t cold enough to justify running the steam house in the shared house--well, at least, not quite yet. The sun was going down, evening was coming on, and though the sky was absolutely beautiful, with the reds and blues and oranges and purples which had dominated since the dust clouds entered the atmosphere—just like Krakatoa had made the world’s sunsets and sunrises unnaturally beautiful, so had nuclear war—it would also grow colder soon enough as evening came on. The boiler would fire up, and the radiators would rattle. And Narcissa, no doubt, would have hot tea waiting.</p><p>They showed their passes to the guards, who had been posted since Narcissa had gained power and importance with the success of her armies. Going up right up to the door with the now familiar glowing scrollwork, the chime of the doorbell was answered in a moment. Narcissa answered that herself. Her eyes widened for a moment, showing the real emotional depths in them, and she pulled Draco into a tight hug.</p><p>Then Delphini brushed past out and her ran out to hug Bellatrix as hard as <em> she </em> could. “<em>Mum!</em>”</p><p>Hermione couldn’t help but just stand there, grinning like a happy idiot, at the two Black Sisters standing there, hugging their respective children. It was humanising to two extremely formidable women.</p><p>“Mum, they put me in a <em>pre-school </em>with the other magical children and I got to learn some simple spells,” Delphini was explaining to Bella so, so proudly as they all went inside.</p><p>“That’s my little witchling,” Bella was laughing. “I’m so proud of you.” They all sat at table around the Samovar. Delphini was just big enough now to do so properly, and took her tea in dignified seriousness.</p><p>Mixing some milk into her tea, Narcissa smiled vaguely. “Colonel Granger, you have my thanks, for helping bring my sister and my son back safely to me, through many adventures.”</p><p>“You’re welcome, Your Grace,” Hermione smiled wryly.</p><p>“Nonsense. It’s always Madame Malfoy, for you.”</p><p><em> But not Narcissa. </em>Hermione knew her aristocratic hauteur, and counted it a victory nonetheless.</p><p>Then Bellatrix took it to the next level. “Ahh, actually, Cissy. About some advice, and a suggestion, that you gave me some, oh, nine months ago or so.”</p><p>Narcissa looked at her sister, at the way she looked. Hermione could tell she was sizing Bella up. Then the same look focused on her. “You’re back together,” she said matter-of-factly, before leaning back, and setting her tea-cup down, her eyes narrowing in thought. "This is as serious as it was with ..."</p><p>"With Thérèse, yes," Bellatrix acknowledged, and that simple acknowledgement was so profound, it almost brought tears to Hermione's eyes.</p><p>Narcissa nodded once. “That's all I needed to hear, Bella. Well, then. Welcome to the family, Hermione.”</p><p>Delphini’s expression was wide-eyed again, as she looked from Narcissa, who had been taking care of her for most of those months, and her mother. “Mum… What’s Auntie Narcissa mean by that?”</p><p>“It means,” Bellatrix started, with a tremble in her jaw, as if saying the words were hard, as if confessing them to her daughter might be the hardest part of them all, “that your mum is going to try to make a family with Hermione. It’s very hard to raise a brilliant little witchling like you, and… Your mother loves Colonel Granger very much.”</p><p>“But, mum, Colonel Granger is a mu-muggleborn. Mum, you didn’t like …” Delphini trailed off, and looked sheepishly at Hermione. “Sorry.”</p><p>Bellatrix nodded gently to her daughter. “I didn’t like muggleborns before, you’re right, my little witchling. But this is a different world. Magic users need to stick together.”</p><p>Narcissa nodded approvingly.</p><p>“...And sometimes, falling in love makes you grow,” Bellatrix added, more sincerely.</p><p>Hermione raised her eyes to Delphini. “I want to hear <em> all about </em>your magical preschool, Delphi. It sounds awesome.”</p><p>
  <em> Welcome to the family. </em>
</p><p>Hermione decided not to look back.</p><p>Narcissa was smiling, but her eyes were also thoughtful.</p><p>Dare one say, calculating—or was that just being unkind?</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>In fact, for all spirits had been high when the destruction of the Morsmordre in Scandinavia had been completed, the situation quickly became more complex. The First Colombo Conference had agreed to a series of military offensives against Voldemort, but Voldemort’s forces quickly demonstrated that they had been surprised by Bellatrix’s defection, and pushed to the limit by conflicting strategic guidance.</p><p>Given clear defensive orders, they could still bite, and bite hard. The largest offensive, launched in early October before the mud came, was executed by the CIS with more than half a million troops. The Minsk Strategic Offensive Operation began with high hopes, but special national divisions and Janissaries were rushed to the front, and Rabastan Lestrange, Bellatrix’s former brother-in-law, was placed in command of the defence.</p><p>She predicted bad things when she heard about that wily shithead finally getting his moment of glory. The result was a nasty bloody nose for the Armies of the CIS. By the end of October, he counterattacked, and even retook Smolensk, in a serious embarrassment for the Russian Army. A hundred thousand soldiers of the CIS were dead by the end of the related battles when December came on, after sixty days of continuous fighting—just another statistic of this hellish war.</p><p>In China, under the mysterious wizarding power of the Juche government of Kim Jong-il, which MinKol intelligence assets were now convinced was in fact only explained by the Kim family themselves actually being wizards (the Hermit Kingdom was almost impossible to understand, to outsiders), the Korean People’s Army had linked up with the Japanese—who were likewise barely more than nominally aligned with Voldemort, and fighting the war mostly for their own reasons—at the Great Wall, allowing a second Shaanxi Offensive, which was going much better for Voldemort’s allies than the first, that Hermione, Ginny and Larissa had fought in.</p><p>The Japanese mostly fought with wizards, with the muggle population supporting them solely to avoid starvation in a post-apocalyptic world where Japan, without food imports, had seen millions dying of hunger a month until the Japanese wizards had begun leading raiding missions further and further south, and ultimately conquered Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and parts of eastern China, to force the peasants to grow food for export to Japan, whether or not they had enough for themselves.</p><p>The Koreans, conversely, primarily used the intact and massive Korean People’s Army, the DPRK having mysteriously only suffered a few minor nuclear bursts, and then having rapidly achieved “reunification” with the much harder hit south, before allying with Voldemort to reclaim “historically Korean lands” in Manchuria.</p><p>The Australians continued to make gains in their counterattacks, however. The Japanese, focusing on China, had no more reinforcements to send to Voldemort’s Indonesian followers, who were mostly responsible for the invasion Army of Australia. That left only the Middle East.</p><p>Dolohov had assumed overall command there, and launched an offensive toward Ankara which had finally collapsed Turkish resistance, with much of the surviving Turkish Army retreating north to the Pontic shore, where the Russian Black Sea fleet worked to secure its evacuation. In the south, the Iraqi Army was in a state of disorder, but fought on in retreat toward the Zagros until, at last, the arrival of Indian troops in the strength of six divisions allowed a counterattack around Mosul which saved Iranian Arabistan and the southern oil fields.</p><p>It was a positive note for the theatre, one which heralded even better news a few days later; Voldemort had, in fact, left Britain, to travel to Beirut, and assume personal command of his Armies in the Middle-East. He had taken Tonks’ bait.</p><p>But the revelations about the Mountain of Ararat meant that it was a position which could not be abandoned, and suddenly the plan seemed less appealing than it had been, before it had been inexorably launched toward the enemy. The Russian Army in the Transcaucasus was under the same order their forefathers had been: <em> Not One Step Back! </em></p><p>But into the gap, the uncertainty, and the consternation, stepped Narcissa Malfoy, Duchess of Lancaster. And she had a plan so audacious that in any other circumstance, it would have been laughed at.</p><p>In these days, the men in suits at the table listened patiently, and thoughtfully, as she laid out her assets, and made her proposal.</p><p>They approved it.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Next begins, gentle reader, the third thematic part of our tale. "The Matter of Britain", or the story of how Narcissa Malfoy leads our witches--and a quite substantial international Army--into helping her try to reclaim the ancestral halls of their family, and, oh, to strike a terrific blow to Voldemort's conventional war machine as well. But for all that, one should be very careful when the push the limits of magic. They may find magic pushing back.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This "Interlude" was posted on the 13/14th of September. There /may/ be a two-week pause before the next chapter, or I may be inspired and finish it sooner. But there will be a short period of chapters coming more slowly, and I may set a fixed schedule of posting for the rest of the chapters. Any thoughts from my readership?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0053"><h2>53. Kitezh</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Kitezh</b>
</p><p> </p><p>It had started soon after they returned to Astana, and it was one of the subtle beauties of magic. Narcissa had remarked, with some relief, “Bella, I think your teeth are looking better.” With a start, Hermione realised then it was true. She had normalised to herself the awful condition of Bellatrix’s teeth, and her refusal to get them fixed which she had never quite explained. Actually, it was horrible, but as with many horrible things in Hermione’s life, it had just stopped mattering after a while.</p><p>Narcissa’s comment had reawakened the wrongness of it, and excited Hermione that it might actually be fixed. She didn’t bring it up to Bellatrix, knowing how sensitive she was about her appearance, but instead watched, day after day, as they made a subtle return to being absolutely beautiful, healthy, perfect teeth.</p><p>Before this point, in almost a year of on and off lust and romance, Hermione could have counted the number of times she kissed Bellatrix on the lips using her fingers and toes, easily. Now she greeted her with a warm kiss in the morning, without hesitation or shame. By the time the healing was done, for all that Bellatrix had complained about not being truly restored to youth, she was a healthy enough woman in her fifties that she could just as well pass for being in her late thirties without much trouble.</p><p>Of course, there was still the arm, which was still covered by a carefully arranged glove and, when out of uniform, engageante. Tonks had been unable to resist remarking on the fact that her aunt was going for the Wrath of Khan look, which had earned her a dirty look from Hermione and blank confusion from the rest of the family. Tonks still found it easiest to cope with her aunt’s rehabilitation with humour.</p><p>The serious reverse during the Minsk operation had locked the front into a standstill. The lines had frozen for the winter, with no serious fighting. It had eliminated their ability to execute an offensive toward central Europe for another year, possibly, while they built their forces up and diverted a large Army into the Transcaucasus and sent more forces to the east to support the Chinese. What loomed, in short, seemed to be the bitter taste of stalemate.</p><p>So one thing had led to another, and after the Christmas dinner, in the frigid chill of January, they had left Astana. They had travelled to Nizhniy Novgorod, and there, Andy had met them at the aeroport. She had Ted with her, and fortunately, thanks to Narcissa while Bellatrix was away, it was not the first time the two cousins had met. Almost exactly the same age, they gave each other a hug and started engaging in an animated conversation in a mishmash of Russian and English.</p><p>Hermione watched the look on Bellatrix’s face, the recognising and accepting and trying to process, that her half-blood daughter was getting along well with her half-blood grand-nephew. The plan, after all, was for Andy to take care of the kids for a few days, so that would give them a little time alone. With the military operations such as they were, they had made a commitment to each other, and had little time to follow it up.</p><p>In return, Andy expected Hermione and Bellatrix to watch both Ted and Delphi for a few days after that. Hermione was acutely aware it was going to be her first taste of motherhood.</p><p>Fortunately, they were going to have a place like nothing she had ever imagined in all the wizarding world to do it in. A place she had wanted to visit for so long, and which now they finally got the chance, courtesy of Larissa, of course, who handed them the set of giant enchanted skeleton keys herself, and made all the arrangements.</p><p>And now they were rattling down Batu’s Road in a beat-up old 1973 GAZ-24 “Volga” which Andy had arranged from the factory where it was normally used as a hack of supervisors like her. There were tyre chains to deal with the snow, at least, and Andy was clipping along at 50km/h, with Bellatrix breathing somewhat hard in the passenger’s seat next to her and Hermione in the back with the children. That had probably been a mistake; the less that she saw of this, the better.</p><p>Andy, though, had a manic grin. It was the first time in her life she had driven her older sister in an automobile, and she had adapted quickly to shifting a stick with her right hand, getting the most out of the 120 horse engine (when new) by smoothly snapping her way through the “four on the floor” she had available to her in the tranny.</p><p>She was wearing driving gloves and a nice long black coat, necessary with the questionable condition of the heater coil in the Volga. Both were snappy.</p><p>Andy, after all, was an exiled aristocrat who’d lived in the middle class since her coming of age, but was still an aristocrat, and if carefully hoarded, the pay from her supervisory position at the GAZ factory was not awful for managing a few luxuries. She was also having a bit of fun with her older sister, who had this simultaneously mildly amazed and stricken expression.</p><p>“Andy…” Bella was looking ahead, through the high piles of snow amidst the trees on each side of the narrow road, the wipers running half-heartedly as the lights helped with illumination under a grey sky, but not too much, and the middle Black sister cheerfully shifted through gears around the turns. “...Where did you learn to drive like this?”</p><p>“Oh, Ted taught me in a ‘68 Wolseley 18/85,” Andy answered with a cheerful grin. “I was terrified at first, I had never seen an automobile before, after all.” She downshifted and powered them through a turn, with Bella’s eyes going wide as Andy did—with the car fishtailing as the engine revved and the chains helped pull them straight.</p><p>From the back seat, Hermione could only grin.</p><p>“Grandmum’s havin’ fun,” Teddy declared.</p><p>“Mum <em>isn’t,</em>” Delphi rejoindered.</p><p>“Of course I’m having fun, dearie!” Bellatrix declared loudly. “It’s quite exciting to watch Andy drive an automobile!”</p><p>The car swung through another turn as Andy sharply worked the gears, and Bella reached out to grip onto the door.</p><p>“Careful, Bella, you don’t want to accidentally open it!” Hermione called out.</p><p>Bella sank back. “Well, you’re quite the driver, Andy, I don’t doubt that.” She pushed herself stiffly into the back of the seat as hard as she could. “...Are we there yet?”</p><p>Both Andy and Hermione unhelpfully giggled together. “Almost!” The younger Black called out. “We’re almost to the lake.”</p><p>“Thank you, Andrasta,” Bellatrix muttered under her breath.</p><p><em>I wonder why she’s invoking the old Gods now but not before. </em>Of course, perhaps she shouldn’t wonder, Hermione told herself – she herself had prayed in desperation, hope and fear after the battle at the Lake. It was enough to make anyone a believer in something, even if it didn’t endorse any particular doctrine.</p><p>The car soon coasted up to a small parking lot, where a large number of old Soviet automobiles and some horse-drawn sleighs were parked. There were several small barns for animals and cars, and Andromeda drove them up to one, and reached out and clapped her hands in a particular pattern; the door obligingly opened for them, and she backed the car in, Bellatrix nervously looking at the walls of the barn—well, really, it was a small carriage house--and expecting Andromeda to hit them at any time.</p><p>“Fyodor Naryshkin showed me that. It’s their carriage-house for their vacation home in Kitezh, and aristocrats shouldn’t have to get out of their car or carriage to open the door,” Andy explained with a grin as she killed the engine. “All right, everyone, we can get out and get the luggage now, and see what is <em>absolutely </em>the most amazing wizarding town in all the world!”</p><p>Hermione apparently couldn’t hide her excitement as she went ‘round to the boot and started pulling out their meagre luggage--well, meagre if it wasn't a set of bags of holding!</p><p>“And there was <em>truly </em>no way to just apparate to it, or take the floo?”</p><p>“No, there really wasn’t, Bella,” Andy answered with a roll of her eyes. “It’s been Unplottable since Batu Khan tried to conquer it with the help of his Shamans. And the residents very much take seriously their responsibility as the largest Wizarding-only settlement in Russia, as a refuge for other witches.”</p><p>They stepped out into the frigid cold, with the kids thoroughly bundled up and Hermione tightening her greatcoat and fastening the collar buttons. Being fed one of the Golden Apples had cured her of her cigarette addiction; she now just occasionally had one with friends. Otherwise, she would have been puffing like a chimney the moment she got out of the car. Bella couldn’t help but rub it in, though, really, her encouragement to stay away from the ‘muggle cancer sticks’ was part of the reason she hadn’t aggressively taken the habit back up for social reasons.</p><p>After all, Bellatrix wasn’t drinking as much, either, and there was a little edge of competition between them sometimes. Since, at the moment, it was over being healthier, Hermione wasn’t going to complain.</p><p>“So, how do we get in?” Bellatrix asked, keeping an eye on Delphi, with a much calmer expression on her face.</p><p>“Right this way,” Hermione grinned. “Larissa was clear on the instructions.” She walked up to two large boulders, which had faint, almost completely obscured runes upon them. There, she picked up a stone from the shore, and tapped it against each boulder, three times, and then cast “<em>Revelto!</em>”</p><p>A high stone tower shimmered into view, on a rock island near the centre of the lake, which was abruptly revealed to be both deeper and larger than it had been before. The nearly circular Lake Svetloyar remained perfectly circular, if not more so, now… But the vision of reality itself changed slightly, to reveal the greater dimensions. And floating above the water, was a bridge of ornately carved boats.</p><p>“Well, that’s more like it,” Bellatrix grinned.</p><p>“Mum, isn’t it clever? The boats make the bridge?” Delphi was grinning. “I’ve never seen a bridge built on top of boats before.”</p><p>“It’s <em>very </em>clever. We use them in the Army, but they’re not so pretty there.”</p><p>“Well these ones are very pretty,” Delphi insisted, and clearly wanted to start out.</p><p>“Hang on just a moment, dear,” Andromeda instructed, as the women collected the luggage. “We’ll all go across together.”</p><p>The archaic carving style was nonetheless beautiful, a whisper of the old living of the Slavs. The wooden bridge was suspended across each of the boats, stiffened with cordage, and adorned with carvings of totemic animals.</p><p>Arriving at the tower, Hermione used one of the skeleton keys to open the great wooden door. When she unlocked it, the door glowed softly, and swung open, shimmering in blue, of its own accord. Lit by soft blue lights, a great spiral ramp descended down through the rock island. Several people were coming up, and looked with interest and a bit of suspicion—Hermione had been warned that, while most of wizarding Russia seemed to have access to a vacation home here, the natives still looked askance at outsiders.</p><p>The <em>children, </em>however, removed that concern. They were curious of the witches and wizards in traditional Russian dress of olden times, and the carvings in the stone walls as they descended down two hundred feet, through thousands of feet of ramp. The little wizard and witch were greeted fondly.</p><p>The second set of doors used the same key as the first. They exited out of the descending spiral passage… And into an underwater city. A city where a gently glowing blue dome held back the water, rising up dozens and dozens of feet, and dimly, the light of the sun through the clear water magnified it, while a magical glow from all of the lights provided a comfortable brightness, as if, in collectivity, it was a daylight and the city were above the water.</p><p>The streets, then, lit with their magical lights, had an air like a city in Carnival at night, bright and colourful but not <em> too </em>late. The buildings recalled the distant history of Russia, but they were built at crazy angles and combinations, in a mix of wood and stone. Domes and towers mingled with pleasant sloped roofs. People and goblins mingled in the streets, with open air markets strung with more magical lights.</p><p>The Lost City of Kitezh, which sank beneath the waters of Lake Svetloyar to escape the arrival of Batu Khan’s Army.</p><p>And everyone here was magical. Bellatrix’s eyes lit up. “There must be at least ten thousand,” she remarked, her tone almost bright. “Come, Delphi, Teddy, see a real wizarding town. Only the Isle of Lyonesse is like this back in Britain, and it’s much more spread out.” She glanced to her sister. “Do you remember, when we were little, reading about this place in the Book of Marvels?”</p><p>“I do,” Andromeda sighed, and looked around longingly, her eyes looking like they were fixed on distant memories. “How did we get so far from those days, all of us cuddled up on the couch reading the Book of Marvels?”</p><p>“Surely it’s no use? We’re here now.”</p><p>Andy flashed a smile. It did reach her eyes, but some of the cold was still in it. She was remembering the book of marvels.</p><p>The three women led the children through the markets and attractions. Here, they seemed so far from the war. Only the posters appealing for volunteers for the uniformed MinKol service could remind them of the front, and the killing upon it. Hermione turned away from them, and in one of the shops of the market, bought Delphi and Teddy some Pastila, cooked on a magical stove. The candy was enchanted, and bounced around in the air to force them to chase down their food, leading to fast running feet through the market, while lights danced overhead.</p><p>The children had their sweets after a merry chase, while the adults watched them and had some tea, from a Samovar that bubbled through colours of Christmas, and floated magical scenes in bubbles inside the tea, which swirled with the glowing colour of the preserves that had been ordered, and then settled down—now with the preserves magically already mixed into the cup. Hermione tried Apricot, and the golden colour reminded her of the dust-motes on the top of Ararat.</p><p>Next, they walked out to the edge of the bubble, at the edge of the city, where it began to slope up past one of the ledges on the bottom of the lake. There, the roads and the buildings stopped, but the bubble gave a warm, firm quivering of resistance as the children played with it, and at last, to Bella’s encouragement, Delphi thrust her arm all the way through, to feel the sharp icy cold of the water beyond.</p><p>“MUM, it’s COOOLD!” She exclaimed with youthful betrayal as she yanked her hand and arm back through the bubble—just to find them completely dry again as she pulled them back in. “Ooh, that’s neat,” the young half-blooded witch declared, before teasing her cousin: “Come on, Teddy, you try it too!”</p><p>“And here I had a drying charm to avoid them catching hypothermia back in the car,” Andromeda laughed softly.</p><p>“Me too,” Hermione admitted with a grin.</p><p>“You need to trust your older sister,” Bellatrix declared to Andy, and then glared at Hermione. “And you need to trust me in general.”</p><p>Andy and Hermione exchanged a look. They knew that Bella was trying to be lighthearted with them. But trust was also the part that was going to take the longest for them.</p><p>Still, Hermione, impulsively, felt warm to Bellatrix. She glanced around, made sure there was nobody about, and ducked in to quickly give her girlfriend a firm hug. “I trust you to be predictable,” she teased back, at last, as their faces, close together, shimmered under the light of the magic bubble.</p><p>In a pleasant and mellow mood which only happy children could bring, they at last headed for the neat house, with a couple of wooden turrets, which sat on top of a set of magical shops off on a pleasant, quiet, cobblestone backstreet. They climbed the stairs past the shop, and there, Hermione used another of the skeleton keys to open the door. She paused on the balcony, and thought about the fact she would be staying with Bellatrix, in this house, that her best friend had lent her, for weeks.</p><p>Hermione took a breath, and opened the door. Inside it was lovely; there were old paintings on the walls, and an Egyptian-styled couch of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century, some indulgence of an upper class family before the revolution, facing a magical radio set, elaborately redecorated and enchanted from some old 1930s Soviet radio. There was a gramophone, too, and Bella pay close attention to it as she sauntered in after the others.</p><p>It was cold on the inside, but Hermione went up to the fireplace and swung her wand. “<em>Incindeo,</em>” she commanded, and even in her foreign tongue to the speaking language of most Russian magic, it responded promptly, coming alight with flame. Waving her wand again, she got the wooden cookstove in the kitchen, and the small potbelly stove down at the end of the hall for heating the rooms, all magic, inside the bubble below Lake Svetloyar.</p><p>Lights began to float in each room that Hermione entered, and she walked through, to see that the Naryshkin family’s household servants had been by to put a selection of clothes down, and bed-sheets and blankets and other such things. The kitchen was even simply stocked, with tea, and preserves, and flour and sugar and salt and a yeast culture for making bread, as well as some crackers; a selection of pickled cabbage and green tomatoes, a jar of pickled shad, some tvorog, butter, and potatoes—that was it, along with a few jars of oil and spices. But that was enough. It was thoughtful and complete, even if they’d have to do more shopping in the town to fully fit the apartment out, and even if Hermione felt a little guilty--it was still lavish by wartime standards, if doubtless austere for the House of Naryshkin.</p><p>Andromeda was, in the meantime, leading the children around to explore, and test out all the magical features, explore a few animated books, and climb up into the turret to look down over the streets. Bellatrix began to unpack, starting with her records. Hermione served the kids some pine cone varenye on the crackers, and tea to Andromeda (the samovar was magical too, so it was no trouble at all to get the zavarka ready in a few minutes); then it was time for them to go.</p><p>Time for her to be alone with Bellatrix.</p><p>Something she had asked for, that.</p><p>Hermione took a moment, over the tea, leaning on the counter; she just watched Bella interact with the children. It wasn’t the words which mattered, but the fact that she seemed to really care for them. As long as Delphi was getting along with Teddy, it seemed Bella had put behind her grand-nephew’s past.</p><p>Andromeda stepped over to her, to put down her tea cup, and spoke softly, “let me know if you need anything, Hermione.”</p><p>“I will. Thank you, Andromeda,” Hermione smiled reassuringly. “She is happy with the children.”</p><p>“I never thought I’d see it, but she is,” Andy agreed, and gave her a quick hug. “Take care, Hermione.” Then she stepped over to her sister, said goodbye and let the children finish their goodbyes—with strong promises to return after a week—and they departed, to return from magical Kitezh back to Nizhniy Novgorod. The door closed to a now warm and bright house, with tea bubbling, even if the market still beckoned for more substantial shopping.</p><p>Bellatrix leaned back on the Egyptian couch, and sighed softly. “I’m going to miss them,” she murmured. “Could you bring me some tea, Hermione?”</p><p>“I can,” the younger witch agreed, and started to pour it. She’d mostly figured out the right ratio for Bella of zavarka to boiling water, and put in some raspberry preserves. “Not planning to go to bed… Any time soon?”</p><p>She had trailed off as the record started playing, soft and comfortable music, and Bellatrix had loosened her uniform jacket and tossed it off to the side on the old couch. “Hardly. I have more important things to do tonight,” Bella answered, a self-confident smirk on her lips as she followed Hermione with her eyes, her voice low and certain.</p><p>That left the younger woman with a distinct feeling of an electric current running up her body. She shivered, and barely sat the two tea glasses down before falling back into the couch alongside Bella. “God, you drive me wild to hear you talk that way.” The instinct to force herself to be responsible was always strong in Hermione, and the next words came thoughtlessly. “Of course, we’ll have to go out anyway, if we want anything different for breakfast.”</p><p>“There’s crackers and preserves, I’ve had worse,” Bella replied, and as Hermione was distracted wondering about how she’d put together a better breakfast than that, she felt a pair of firm and plump lips on her own, all abruptly.</p><p>
  <em>Oh, uhm…</em>
</p><p>Then a tongue followed them. The smaller woman nonetheless pressed herself down on Hermione with a predatory urgency. Her gloved hand reached around to cup the nape of Hermione’s neck, and press her down, with her tongue teasing along the younger woman’s until all thought of shopping lists and how to make breakfast vanished into the explosive need that kiss unleashed.</p><p>When the kiss ended and their lips parted, Bella was grinning. “At least I’m more interesting than a loaf of bread.”</p><p>“Oh, uhm, you are <em>so </em>much more interesting than a loaf of bread, I…” Hermione cut herself off, realising she was babbling.</p><p>Folded in her lap, pushing her down firmly into the couch, Bellatrix began to unbutton her uniform, occasionally pausing to brush her leather glove against Hermione’s cheek. “It’s so much easier to get a witch out of her robes,” the older woman muttered in bemusement.</p><p>“Then … Why don’t you wear them?”</p><p>“I control who takes me out of my clothes at all times, pet,” she smiled, but in her eyes, there was a sharp intensity, a warning.</p><p>“All right. But, then I’ll make a request of you, then – I want to see you naked. You never…”</p><p>Hermione was shut up by another kiss, though that really wasn’t an answer, she couldn’t resist it either. With Bella’s hands so insistent upon her, and her own hands eager, what remained of her own uniform was made short work of. It was then, and only then, still refusing to give her an answer, that Bellatrix nonetheless reached out to take Hermione’s hands, and guide them, with her own—one beautifully pale white, one clad in black leather—never quite leaving Hermione’s, as if the contact between their hands made it okay.</p><p>And at some point, without really keeping track, the beautiful body of that dark goddess of a lover she had found was splayed over her, nude, save for her left arm. Of course.</p><p>Hermione didn’t press the point. She kissed up Bella’s shoulder and the nape of her neck, and they fell together rather naturally on the couch, Bella curled against her on the side, Hermione curled over her. They pulled the coverlet over themselves, and it seemed like a moment where, by mutual consent, their paused, and just revelled in their nudity pressed close together.</p><p>Bella reached for her tea. “I’m capable of admitting I’d have only myself to blame if it went cold,” she remarked with a wicked grin alight in her eyes.</p><p>Hermione felt the need to finish her own in a few quick gulps, but the act dropped the coverlet and bared both of their breasts. Bellatrix did not look like a woman in her fifties, not after Ararat.</p><p>She also seemed like a Queen on her throne, regally watching Hermione’s attraction to her. The thought made the younger woman blush. “God, Bella,” she murmured at last as she recovered from it. “I’d let anything go cold to keep looking at you.”</p><p>“Well, I think I’ve had enough, Pet,” and with that smooth declaration, the glass went away, and a leather gloved hand shot out to run across Hermione’s nipples, firmly squeezing one, firm and pert, before the other. “Your turn to start. Fuck me.”</p><p>Bella was in a needy mood, that much was clear; but Hermione was so turned on, she’d oblige anything. Bella’s firm hands pushed her down, and Hermione gave in, and settled between the elder woman’s legs.</p><p>Bellatrix, sitting back, splayed across the couch under the warmth of magical fires in the fireplaces and stoves—enough to make it comfortable enough for nakedness, comfortable enough for this. She looked so confident, so relaxed, though her hands were anything but, actively guiding Hermione to her.</p><p>Hermione could barely stand that—in a good way. The erotic feeling of leather on her bare flesh, pushing her along—leather cupping her head, her kinky hair. <em> I think I’m getting a fetish for Bella’s glove. </em></p><p>Her lips were pressed down into Bella’s thatch, the <em> other </em>dense mass of silken curls Bellatrix had. No trimming, no cutting, no caring about the wild disorder her lower hairs were, except – she did something magical to keep them like the hair on her head.</p><p>That scent of pine that marked Bella was strong and intoxicating in a heady mix of lust. Hermione pressed her lips down into the hair that tickled her nose, and planted a kiss on her wet, aroused girlfriend. Bella wouldn’t let her up again, those two hands, one of flesh and one of leather, locked together behind her head and shoulders, leaving her trapped in place – but she <em> wanted </em>to be here.</p><p>An encouraging happy noise came from Bella. Hermione had done this before, she’d started to learn what her lover wanted. She extended her tongue, as her hands came up from below, brushing over her inner thighs; she licked, licked again, stroking her tongue up along skin, matting hair down to her lover’s sex.</p><p>That long stroke of her tongue brought Bella’s hands pressing her into thrusting hips; she sucked in her breath through her nose, overwhelming with the scent of a woman’s sex. All she needed and wanted in the moment of passion.</p><p>Bella <em> was </em>her world as her tongue licked, stroked, pressed firmly, and her fingers worked their way up—playing around her folds, then fingering her as Hermione licked further up, more intently with her tongue; got Bella to arch her back like a cat, when she began to pleasure her clit with sharp, quick motions of her tongue, working up each side in turn, pressing down firmly on the hood of her clit with her upper lip.</p><p>Her world in that moment consisted utterly of Bellatrix. Bella’s thighs pushed on her cheeks; Bella’s hands held her head. Bella’s clit was below her tongue and lips; the folds of Bella’s sex were beneath her fingers; Bella’s moans, and Hermione had managed to make her moan, now, were in her muffled ears. Bella’s scent overwhelmed her senses. Then, the older woman hiked her thighs up over Hermione’s shoulders, pushing her down into the couch, and caught in her thighs, it might as well be that all of Hermione’s world was Bellatrix.</p><p>The move came with a soft groan from her lover, a response to the quickening pace and the firmness that Hermione had learned to give her. Heeled back into the couch at a sharp angle, now, the strength of Bella’s thighs and hips were pitted against Hermione’s shoulders, and the tension was wildly arousing to the older woman she pleasured.</p><p>There was an intensity in the moment which banished every other thought. Even for Hermione, who was only giving, and not receiving; she appreciated in a moment exactly why Bella had insisted on it for herself, even at the beginning of her relationship. One of Bella’s leather-gloved fingers ran down firmly to the nape of Hermione’s neck, though, and sent a shiver through her.</p><p>“Clearly not hard enough, if you think to do that,” Hermione muttered against her lover’s sex, as the shiver made her own back arch.</p><p>“Then <em>harder,</em>” Bella answered saucily, a moan on her lips and in her words.</p><p>Hermione kissed and sucked on the skin around Bella’s clit, and her tongue pushed, up from below. Another minute, maybe two, of quickly and firmly pleasuring her thus, and Hermione could tell that her lover was close, a moan shuddering from her lips in the last moment, even as Hermione felt she was drowning in Bella-ness, Bella was orgasming against her, her hips jerking as the woman’s fingers gripped on her hair, causing just a bit of pain.</p><p>An act of need and love had been consummated between them. For a few weeks, then, they could pretend the war didn’t exist. But nuzzled up into Bella’s sex, even the minutes felt like a comfortable eternity.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. Starting a new life in a mixed muggle community as a decided member of the middle class who needed to learn how to interact in British muggle society--during the 1970s no less--Andromeda has managed to drive some truly awful cars in her life.</p><p>2. In the legend, Kitezh was undefended, when Batu Khan approached to sack it; the inhabitants prayed, and the city was consumed by Lake Svetloyar, only to carry on life below the waves.  Thus the road to the lake is still called the Trail of Batu, as it's the road his troops took on the advance from the Volga toward the city. In this case, it was a magical community, which Batu Khan sought to destroy to give his Shamans more leeway in helping him dominate the Russians, in the days before the statute of secrecy. So it was protected with powerful magics, beneath the lake, where it remains to the present.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0054"><h2>54. Gather Ye Rosebuds</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Gather Ye Rosebuds </b>
</p><p> </p><p>Somewhere on the list of things that Hermione Granger had never expected to do with her life was have sex with Bellatrix Black. Somewhere even further down that list, incongruously, had probably been “bake bread with Bellatrix Black”. But, tear into a piping hot loaf of bread she had, with tea and varenye, having successfully baked up the loaf from their supply of ingredients that Larissa had left for them.</p><p>Bellatrix sat with her legs crossed on a kitchen stool, looking absolutely fabulous for it. She was dressed in her classic black, not a uniform, now. They had been on vacation for a few days, and every night, they had sex, and Hermione felt a compulsive urge to write it down in a diary, even though she wasn’t keeping one.</p><p>The kitchen flickered with magical light, and Bellatrix at her bread, leaned back until the stool tipped, and her back braced into the counter-top, occasionally taking a sip of her tea. It was so relaxed that Hermione never wanted it to end, though her innate curiosity warred with that sentiment.</p><p>In fact, what she knew of Bellatrix was mostly from experience. Since their flight from England those years ago, Andromeda and Narcissa had not exactly shared much with the former members of the Order of the Phoenix or Dumbledore’s Army, what their home life had been. Bellatrix had confided her past loves, and her passion for a theory of magic to incorporate magical manipulation of electricity. Hermione was certainly tempted to ask her many questions about the later, but Bellatrix felt she could no longer practice it, and the younger witch was wary of bringing up things that would remind Bella of what she had lost.</p><p>So she asked about something else, instead. Or, at least, a more open question. She topped her tea off, and then settled, facing Bellatrix. “Bella, would you tell me about your family? I mean, the history of the House of Black in general. If I’m going to help raise Delphini, I should be able to help her to feel pride in her ancestors.”</p><p>Bellatrix stared at her as if she had grown a second head. Or maybe a third.</p><p>For a moment, Hermione was intensely uncomfortable with the expression. <em>What did I just fuck up? </em>She wondered.</p><p>“...Pet, you actually want to know? To help me raise Delphini?” Bella’s voice sounded small, as if with disbelief, like she half thought she was being mocked.</p><p>Hermione jerked her head in assent. “Absolutely. Bella, I can see from the way you interact that family is enormously important to all of you—yourself, Narcissa, Andromeda. Even Andromeda… Maybe especially Andromeda.”</p><p>As much as Hermione hated to admit it, the wince that produced from Bellatrix was reassuring. Though Bella still gave Andromeda a hard time, it seemed tempered with a growing attachment, which caused her to regret the length of time she had spent away from her sister. It seemed positive that Bella cared enough to now feel a measure of shame. Hermione just hated being reassured by her girlfriend’s shame.</p><p>“Yes well. We are Blacks, and even Andy knows this,” Bella answered idly. “As for the history of my house? We are witches and wizards, and we have been since time immemorial.”</p><p>“...And I believe it. But what does that mean?”</p><p>“On the Distaff, my most ancient ancestors did their magic at the peat-bogs along the coast of Lancashire at Blackpool, where the city gains its name, from the streams that, running through the bogs, sent black water into the sea,” Bella began, refilling her tea. “Pure Celtic, their name actually means something similar to the patrilineal side’s—the House of Dubh. That is, Black, in Celtic. They were Brigantes before the Romans.”</p><p>“Huh. You’re descended from <em>two </em>lines named Black.”</p><p>“Approximately so.” Bellatrix seemed bemused. “On the patrilineal side, we are descended from the House of Black, who were Angles who settled in Lindsey, south of the Humber, in the year 540 of the Christian count.”</p><p>Hermione blinked. “...Wait, you know the exact year your male-side ancestors settled in Britain in the sixth century?”</p><p>Bella smirked. “<em>Of course. </em> They are so awful at teaching you muggle-borns anything substantial about magical history. That includes the fact that magical history is far more complete than among muggles. An illiterate witch is <em> useless. </em> We’ve always written, since the days we burned runes to wood with our wands. The reality is that the whole 20<sup>th </sup> century, Hogwarts has been dominated by half-blood Gryffindors and blood traitors, favouring…” Bella looked suspiciously at Hermione as if she expected the woman to object to her use of the term blood traitor.</p><p>But Hermione just listened. It wasn’t a slur against her, and she understood what Bella meant. If she had been a Slytherin, she would have, she felt, been justifiably infuriated with how Dumbledore had blatantly favoured the students of other Houses. <em> How many people did that drive toward Voldemort, anyway? </em>There was no way to know now, of course.</p><p>“Well, Hogwarts was fucked up when I went there,” Bella finally settled for, relaxing when Hermione didn’t complain. “Dumbledore was an ass to the Slytherin students, and never gave a reason.”</p><p>“Yes, he was,” Hermione acknowledged aloud. “I’d have been furious if he treated me that way. I didn’t think about it at the time, though, I was just…”</p><p>“Happy to win?” Bella cackled. “How Slytherin of you. Perhaps House Slytherin could better be called ‘House Human Nature’. We’ve always been <em>honest </em>in the way you lions haven’t, Pet.”</p><p>The younger witch flushed. “All right, I admit, I wanted to win very badly. I wanted to prove myself.” She fixed a stare on Bella. “But you like that about me, don’t you?”</p><p>“<em>Of course </em>I do.” Her voice changed abruptly to more of an ominous tone. “Try to be less of a hypocrite about it, pet.”</p><p>“Maybe,” Hermione sniffed, “I just want the world to be a better place.”</p><p>“<em>How naive.</em>”</p><p>“Suit yourself. You changed, after all.” She couldn’t help grinning broadly.</p><p>“Do you want to hear about my family or not?” Bella changed the subject, back to the original subject. Of course.</p><p>Hermione nodded. “I do, so I’ll let it drop.”</p><p>“Very well then. So, in the seventh century, part of the Lordly House of Blaec converted to Christianity; the wizarding side refused to convert, and ultimately, fled to the west to escape the influence of the Bishops. By that point, the whole of the Cumbric lands was under the reign of the Kingdom of Northumberland, but in the isolated parts of the west—in what would be Lancashire—the folk still spoke Cumbric and knew better than to bother with the business of Sorcerers. The Church-men, though, roamed through the land and preached the Gospel, and it went like it did for the Caliph Umar before the Temple of Fire.”</p><p>Hermione sucked in her breath. The memory of that was still raw. She closed her eyes and shivered. “How did they win?”</p><p>“Did they? Blaec married Dubh, and in the end, as the meanings of the words themselves merged together in the tongue of the age, became simply the House of Black. We endure.”</p><p>“Well, Britain is Christian, and so is Wizarding Britain, and …”</p><p>Bella smirked savagely. “I’m not. I promise you my sisters aren’t, either. We also speak Cumbric.”</p><p>“The language is extinct!”</p><p>“Not among Wizarding families of the North-West.”</p><p>“...Will you teach me?” Hermione’s eyes shone.</p><p>And now, Bella smiled without any false pretences at all, and nodded. Her pale skin seemed to shine in the magical light of the kitchen. “I’m glad you care enough to ask, pet. I will. Shall we retire to the sitting room?”</p><p>“By all means,” Hermione agreed, and used her wand to command the Samovar to float along after them. Sometimes, she felt like she had nicely upped her game in terms of class-based behaviours. Being around the Black Sisters so much had made her start to speak in a more courtly language that she had not known before.</p><p>With the samovar on a table in front of them, Hermione settled onto the settee, with Bellatrix… Settling down at her side. The two women together were pressed up against each other, in body and thigh, and it was sensuously comfortable.</p><p>They poured more tea, and Hermione collected her thoughts. “All right. So where does the motto come from? I admit, I thought you might be Norman, like the Malfoys, because of the motto. And your connection to the Lestrange.”</p><p>Bellatrix cackled, but leaned back easily, slipping an arm around Hermione in a way that made her feel comfortable, while she drank her tea. “I married Lestrange. I’m no closer to them than all the Anglo-French pureblood houses are to each other.”</p><p>“Then how <em>did </em>you end up with a French motto?”</p><p>“The Harrying of the North. Of course, we resisted the Norman conquest in any way that we could. But, magical resistance, like armed resistance generally, was impossible against the sorcerers we faced. Thus began the first great dying of British magical culture… The second was when we let all the muggle-borns in.” Bellatrix paused, and stiffened.</p><p>Hermione pursed her lips. “Can you name a moment when your culture died because of people like me, Bella?”</p><p>Bellatrix withdrew her arm. She leaned away from Hermione, but, she did also turn to look directly at the younger woman. “Pet, it’s just what I was taught, so I said it.”</p><p>“So. It’s not true, but you just repeated it anyway out of habit?”</p><p>Bellatrix seemed torn between her love and her pride. Her eyes met Hermione’s, but she didn’t speak. Finally, she nodded her head in assent.</p><p>Non-vocal though it was, Hermione accepted it. She leaned in closer, insistently, and hugged Bella from the side. “All right. Please do continue. I <em>am </em>intensely fascinated. I <em>do </em>want to learn Cumbric.”</p><p>“We fled to France, to find refuge with the enemies of the Tyrant William,” Bellatrix answered. “Other Anglo-Saxon families of rank fled to Scandinavia, and others to Scotland; a larger group, with many more retainers, even went to Constantinople, and settled part of the Crimean.”</p><p>“Really? The Crimean? Do they have any descendants?”</p><p>“In fact, yes—if you ask your friend Larissa, she’d be able to tell you she’s descended in a very small part from a British magic family through her Tatar side.” Bellatrix waved idly. “Beyond all the spell-books, a pureblood girl is expected to be well-versed in the detailed genealogies of Miskvart’s Wizarding Almanach. These are the things they don’t bother to teach to you. Anyway, the House of Black ended up in France, serving Count Fulk le Rechin. We were loyal French, but we kept our British magic.”</p><p>“Exile.” Hermione reached for her tea again. “Well, I know that feeling.”</p><p>“You do, pet,” Bellatrix admitted with a wry smirk. “For me, I don’t feel so exiled, for I still have an Army.”</p><p>It was a little bit of a thoughtless dig born of privilege, but in fact, Hermione chose not to see it that way. Bella’s Army was her Army in the way it counted—as a hope for the future of Britain. “How did you return to England?”</p><p>“Oh, quite simple – centuries past, all of the principals of that bitter age were dead, even with the long lives we witches are blest with. My ancestors dearly wished to return to England—our family magic was attuned to the British soil, and British climate, and British ways—and took advantage of the Treaty of Troyes to do so—though a branch of the family remains in Maine. The loyalty of our house to King Henry’s claim by treaty to the French throne, was rewarded with lands in our native Lancashire, which we have held since.”</p><p>There was something studious in Bella explaining all of this. Something like the Brightest Witch of Her Age talking to the Brightest Witch of Her Age. Something comfortably book-worm, history-nerd about it all, a nice space for Hermione to occupy. It was sweet, and it was different the impulsive Bella. Different from the Bella who had learned all her adult life to be rewarded for her impulsivity. A hint of a different universe, a different reality where none of the stupid pure blood customs existed and if they’d been born at the same time they could have been friends at school, the two smartest girls showing up all the boys together.</p><p>Maybe even dated, and come upon this relationship they had, a bit more honestly.</p><p><em> It’s honest enough to be love, isn’t it? </em>Hermione accused herself.</p><p>Bella was looking to her. The look was intent, thoughtful, and perhaps a bit dangerous. It promptly ended Hermione’s reverie.</p><p>“Ah, Bella…?”</p><p>“Let’s start you learning Cumbric,” the older witch grinned.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>It was only a few days, but it was wonderful. They shopped and amused themselves in Kitezh. Bellatrix seemed so comfortable in a city purely of magic. They teased each other, and acted a bit flirty. They bathed, often, in the private banya of the Naryshkin, which was heated magically, considering fires couldn’t be had (safely, anyway), under the magic globe encompassing Kitezh. Bella was still demanding, and tended to expect Hermione to cook the food herself, but other than that, it was a remarkably laid back few days, a comfortable relationship.</p><p>A hint of normality, with a lot of sex on the side. One might almost call it idyllic, for all that there was a war going on. They had dared great things together. The dust of the 7<sup>th</sup> century still seemed to linger in their noses. Now they just spent a great deal of time doing very little at all.</p><p>Were it that it could last longer than a few days. In fact, the respite from thinking about anything at all lasted for four days. They were in fact the only four days that Hermione had remembered as comfortable and nice since her Hogwarts days, without looming fear. In France, after they had escaped Britain, she had waited for the hammer to fall. In Russia, she had certainly kept herself too busy to even really think. Until now, anyway.</p><p>The moment when the world intruded again had been a knock on the door, while they were sharing some freshly baked bread on the couch for a light breakfast.</p><p>“Did you arrange a delivery?” Bellatrix asked, not bothering to look up.</p><p>“No..” Hermione answered, setting her plate down on the low table in front of the couch, close by the ubiquitous samovar.</p><p>“Well, check it please,” Bellatrix directed, idly reaching for her wand.</p><p><em>Of course she first thinks of a conspiracy against her, </em>though, Hermione had to admit, it was not unwarranted. She made sure of her own wand ready, and wandered over to the door of the flat. Nobody should be able to visit who was not a member of Russian Wizarding society or one of their guests, but still, it was best to be safe.</p><p>The lack of tension over the past few days was more amazing for the way it snapped back into place, like the tension of a spring at once released, coiling into her muscles, every sense and sensation sharpening, the forms of movement which called forth combat spells slipping unbidden into her mind, ready to act without thinking. Ready to kill.</p><p>Something as simple as going to the door to check for an unexpected ring of the bell had changed forever.</p><p>For all that, it was rather simple. Hermione tossed a bathrobe over her light clothes, and checked the enchanted mirror in the door which showed the other side, broadly enough to clear it from not just the visitor, but anyone who might be lurking.</p><p>It was fine: Narcissa Malfoy was at their door. “Bella, it’s Narcissa.”</p><p>“...What’s she doing here?” Bellatrix sighed audibly. “Oh well, do let her in, pet.”</p><p>Hermione opened the door. “Narcissa, come in, and make yourself at home.”</p><p>Narcissa had dressed heavily, but carried her outer coat, since inside the un-frozen part of the lake, the temperature was about a constant 1 – 2 degrees centigrade at this depth. She smiled. “Hermione. Thank you.”</p><p>Permitted informality or not, Hermione stepped back, and held the door open at attention. Narcissa breezed past her like that was the most normal thing in the world, and put her outer coat, and then the inner, up on the racks at the front. “Going to greet your sister, Bella?” She called out.</p><p>“I’m feeling lazy,” the elder Black sister replied.</p><p>“As honest as always, Bella,” Narcissa replied with a matter-of-fact and dignified tone, but Hermione, as she shut and latched the door again, could hear the real, intense warmth in her voice despite it all. “At least now you have someone in your life more polite than you are. It’s certainly one of Hermione’s virtues in comparison to Monsieur Lestrange.”</p><p>“Still glad he’s dead, Cissy!” Bellatrix cried out.</p><p>“I have no doubt,” the younger sister stepped into the sitting room, with Hermione following her. In fact, for all of her diffident attitude, Bellatrix had stood up, and as Narcissa entered the room, enfolded her in a hug.</p><p>“Cissy.”</p><p>“Bella. You look well. And I do mean that.”</p><p>“The effects of Ararat and the Water of Life, I suppose, for what good it was;” Bellatrix waved a hand as she disentangled from her sister and turned back. “Sit, drink tea, the samovar is hot as always, Cissy.”</p><p>“One, those effects were <em>very good </em>for you, Bella,” Narcissa said matter-of-factly as she moved to sit. “Two, it’s more than that.”</p><p>Hermione followed her in and moved to sit next to Bella again, just for Bella, lounging about in an evening robe tossed over a dress, to reach out and grab her. “Well, I suppose she helps.”</p><p>Narcissa rolled her eyes. “You’ll mortify Hermione, dear.”</p><p>Hermione had, in fact, started blushing.</p><p>Bella waved a hand idly and smirked. “Perhaps I like doing that. So what brought you here, Cissy? I doubt it was just an idle chat, considering the place is Unplottable and you …”</p><p>“Unplottable? Well, the city is, but you can certainly apparate to the lake.”</p><p>Bella’s eyes widened. “But Andy <em>drove me here </em> in some <em>old muggle car</em> on one of those <em>damned icy Russian roads!</em>”</p><p>“I’d say she played you very well, Bella,” Cissy smirked right back.</p><p>“ANDY! BETRAYER!” Bella exclaimed in indignation “Why…!” The elder Black sister sighed and sank back into the couch, a hand going for Hermione’s shoulder.</p><p>Hermione desperately tried not to giggle.</p><p>Bella’s eyes flared. “Betrayer! Don’t you even start!”</p><p>“All right. All right,” Hermione said hastily, though only partially succeeding at avoiding the laughter. She looked up to Narcissa and hid a grin as best as she could. “While this has been very amusing…”</p><p>“SPEAK FOR YOURSELF!” Bella seemed unable to realise how funny her indignation was about Andy and the car.</p><p>“...You still probably came for more than to socialise,” Hermione continued, shaking her head and grinning.</p><p>“I understand that Andy has loved automobiles for quite some time,” Narcissa observed dryly to her elder sister.</p><p>Bella rolled her eyes. “Muggle death traps. I could have apparated to the lake, after all...”</p><p>“Yes, quite, Bella. But you’re here now, so let’s all settle down with our tea, because what we’re discussing is important, and it’s going to take time.”</p><p>“I am on vacation, Cissy,” Bella side-eyed her.</p><p>“There won’t be a real vacation until Voldemort is defeated, and we are back in Britain,” Narcissa said rather tartly, as she stirred cherry varenye into her tea. “And that’s exactly what I’ve come to talk about, Bella, Hermione. Voldemort’s defeat, and Britain. You know he has moved to take personal command of the Army in the Near East?”</p><p>“Yes, we’re aware,” Hermione answered for Bellatrix, who with pursed lips and an intensely distracted expression, was refilling her own tea.</p><p>“We are in contact with a prominent figure in Voldemort’s Navy, which has predominantly British officers and men.” The younger Black sister spoke levelly, but her voice still commanded immediate attention, with Bellatrix snapping to look at her. “I have received the support of the allied governments. We will be mustering our forces in Norway with the spring.”</p><p>Hermione sucked in her breath and <em>stared. </em>It was audacious in the extreme. She could not believe that the allies had agreed to it.</p><p>Bellatrix stared at her sister. “An… An invasion of Britain. While Voldemort is in Syria, directing the offensive toward Ararat.”</p><p>“Yes, precisely so. If the fleet defects, the Russian Navy, and the Scandinavian naval forces, can cover the landings with it. I intend, Bellatrix, for you to be in overall command of the operation, though I will be there personally.”</p><p>Bella sucked in her breath. “Cissy, you are the Head of Government. Let me handle the entire operation. And did we really need to discuss it now?”</p><p>“People will switch sides to follow the instructions of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. General Black? I’m sorry, Bella… I need to be there. Also, I am a trained combat witch just like yourself. You know that. There is no pureblood girl who does not know how to fight, and I have had cause to do it before.” Cissy’s eyes narrowed. “This will be <em>everything. </em>We are not safe unless we reclaim Britain.”</p><p>“Maybe I want to gather my rosebuds while I may. And maybe, I want to keep my little sister safe.” Bellatrix bowed her head.</p><p>Narcissa stared, silent, for a moment; then she briskly shook her head. “I am sorry, Bella, but there’s nothing to keep me safe from anymore. I made my own accommodation with the world. I love you as my sister, and I forgive you, because I know why you did what you did, and it was with my own interests in mind. But, it made me the woman I am, and a <em>beau geste </em>now can’t change that. The point is, this. We must engineer a large-scale defection of wizards and military forces.”</p><p>“All right.” Bella stared into her tea, and Hermione thought her expression might be outright glum. “Well, it’s not enough to deal with the fleet,” she answered her sister’s appeal. “They will apparate and use the portkeys and Floo network to send back terrorists to attack the advance and rally resistance. They will use the Chunnel to send over divisions from the continent. The Dark Lord will make the war scorched Earth from one end of Britain to the other, rather than lose it.”</p><p>“I want to prepare a plan to destroy the Chunnel.”</p><p>“How?” Bella looked up. “It’s the nightmare of all good Britons. I am sure our ancestresses had nightmares of such a working of magic, in the days of Caesar. An Army in possession of both ends—and that they are, for we must land in Scotland, if we are to land at all, our forces carried over from Norway—can safely count on reinforcement from all the rest of Europe. If we manage to get across the Firth of Forth in those circumstances before we are stopped by the mass of the enemy against us, I should think myself the most brilliant military commander who has ever lived! It’s too deep to be easily targeted, and it’s been warded against any kind of attack, conventional or magical.”</p><p>“What about nuclear weapons?” Narcissa looked sharp at her sister.</p><p>“...Detonating above the Chunnel? They won’t actually even damage it,” Bella cackled. “Sorry.”</p><p>“Actually…” Hermione pursed her lips, thinking through the array of Russian weaponry. “What about anti-submarine nuclear weapons?”</p><p>Bella mocking faked a yawn. “Not enough range, pet. They’d have to get close—the ships would have to get past …” She grimaced, “Azkaban.”</p><p>“So it is a fortress again? The intelligence analysis I read was not sure.” Narcissa sat down her tea, now empty.</p><p>“Yes. As great of a magical strongpoint as can be made.”</p><p>“Well, I intend to destroy it as well,” Cissy shrugged, and looked levelly at her sister. “Do you think we can make it work, if we can destroy the Chunnel, and disrupt their reinforcements?”</p><p>Bella leaned into Hermione, grabbing her by the shoulders, her body canted at an almost lascivious angle. “I suppose it will let me have fun trying. Frankly, Cissy, it all comes down to how many of the wizards and officers you get to defect. So tell me. What handsome young British sorcerer have you seduced into thinking thoughts of treason, hmm?”</p><p>For a moment, Hermione was sure that Narcissa was going to lose it with Bella. But then, she just smirked wickedly, and met her sister’s expression with one of her own: Confident, dangerous, and the true mistress of the situation. “I would say, sister-dear, that he seduced himself.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. Miskvart’s Wizarding Almanach -- my Wizarding equivalent of the Almanach de Gotha, the comprehensive listing of all the Peers of Europe. To be "in the Almanach" was to be recognised at the highest level of the old European aristocracy. The Blacks, the Malfoys, and the Naryshkin would all certainly be featured.</p><p>2. In creating the family tree of the House of Black I included some typical features--such as a connection to France--from other fiction, but also tried to firmly ground them in a history of very long and well established British wizarding lineages dating back to Celtic times. I wanted to centre the family on Lancashire because of the commonality of the name Black there, but in the peerage, the only occurrence of the name Black outside of modern times was in Lincolnshire dating to the 7th century, and those Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Scotland. However, from this, I was able to put together an entertaining family tree... And The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black certainly deserves one of those. </p><p>3. Azkaban was originally a fortress, and one must imagine that, to be useful as one in the midst of the North Sea, it had to have some kind of magical weaponry of considerable power...</p><p>4. Yes, there really was a Byzantine-founded colony of New England in the Crimean for Anglo-Saxon exiles from the Norman Conquest! </p><p>5. The title is derived from Robert Herrick, the Cavalier poet’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, a 17th century poem. A Waterhouse Painting was done in honour of this line, and it was used more ominously as the title of the first episode of the BBC Drama “By the Sword Divided”.</p><p>In conclusion -- did anyone really doubt Andy would try to have some fun with her sister like that? :-)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0055"><h2>55. First North Sea</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Rosyth Dockyard, Firth of Forth</b>
</p><p>
  <b>29 January, 2004</b>
</p><p> </p><p>The sideparty in their crisp dark blue uniforms was marred by the black-and-green flash of the Morsmordre. Still, it was necessary to represent their service to the Dark Lord, even if the colours didn’t exactly match, the patches standing out against the background of dirty snow against the blue of the Firth and the grey of the ship’s hull behind them.</p><p>They stood alongside the aircraft carrier <em>Inflexible, </em><span>the largest in Voldemort’s Navy. She had a very fine hull, 293.5 metres long. Her overhanging flight deck thrust her out longer, from the tips of the steam catapults to the landing approach lights aft, near the end of the angled deck. Her single massive funnel was separated from the bridge tower, which was situated forward, and made her look a bit like the 1920s vintage American </span><em>Lexington </em><span>and </span><em>Saratoga. </em></p><p>
  <span>A subtle hint of her origin was in the metal bulges which extended out from the regular hull, curving but still somewhat awkward additions, starting above the water-line and descending below it; </span>
  <span>painted black to contrast the grey of the hull, until they met the red below the waterline.</span>
  <span> The hangar and flight deck were built up off of them, and the elevators hung over them. Like a battleship converted to an aircraft carrier—or the unfinished Italian </span>
  <em>Aquila. </em>
</p><p>
  <span>In fact, the trim, dusky-skinned, handsome man who stood before the ship knew well that she was quite risky to take as his flagship. Certainly, the </span>
  <span>VLS cells loaded with Aster 15 </span>
  <span>would provide some anti-air cover, and if they failed, the six Goalkeepers were a last ditch. Her hull was stronger than a normal merchant, too, and sure, the bulges added some protection against torpedoes—marginally. </span>
  <span>He acknowledged the salutes, then, and stepped aboard, up the gangway, </span>
  <span>made slick with melted snow. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The man appeared perfectly calm; but most of Voldemort’s Lieutenants would have felt justly wary at going to sea with their flagship being the converted ocean liner </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Queen Elizabeth 2. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>The British shipbuilding industry might be the most intact in the world after the nuclear exchanges, but it was still a ruin through economic forces and the decline of the Empire and the fleet. The Dark Lord’s brave new world did not need ocean liners—Muggles did not need luxuries, and why would a Wizard ever take such a thing—but it did certainly need warships, to carry the fight to the wizards and muggles too stupid to give in to his ambition. When refitted with diesel-electric propulsion in the late 1980s, she had made 34 kts on trials. That was enough to justify her conversion.</span>
  </span>
</p><p><span><span>The hangar and deck were packed with navalised Typhoons </span></span><span><span>for air defence—sixteen of them—but it was a force of an equal number of elderly Blackburn Buccaneers which served the attack role. Stripped of modern electronics, they had been enchanted to make them more or less stealth aircraft—more than making up for their old bones, even if it had been done out of simple necessity due to delays in fielding the fully capable F3 ground-attack version of the Rafale-M by the Morsmordre.</span></span> <span><span>As</span></span><span><span> he made his way up to the bridge, </span></span><span><span>the man shook his head. He had quickly become familiar with the full panoply of muggle technology. There were the ironically named “Merlin” helicopters on the deck, six in total for S&amp;R and ASW, and </span></span><span><span>American E-2s </span></span><span><span>too, even though they </span></span><span><span>were almost too big for the elevators, </span></span><span><span>but four of them had been wedged on anyway</span></span><span><span>. </span></span><span><span>The men, of course, had her fully dressed, lining the rails.</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>M’Lord,” the Captain greeted him as he reached the bridge. </span></span></p><p>Blaise Zabini smiled assiduously, betraying no smirk on his face. “Captain Palliser.” There was none of that ‘may you live forever’ rot in the Navy.</p><p>“When will Admiral Lowe arrive, M’lord?”</p><p>“Tomorrow, two hours before we sail,” Blaise answered with a mild shrug. “Is she ready for inspection? I will do it myself.”</p><p>“Of course, M’lord.” They saluted, and Captain Arthur Palliser fell in alongside the new commander of Voldemort’s Navy.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Inflexible</span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>’s Captain was responsible for the actions of </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>three thousand and five hundred muggles </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>assigned to this single ship. With them were </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>ten </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>wizards. And ten wizards living on a </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>cramped ship </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>with three thousand and five hundred muggles was not precisely a choice assignment. They were all Half-Bloods, except for the ones that were outright Mudbloods with Certificates of Purification. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>Some had been shocked that Blaise had sought out the appointment, but others knew better. They could see a man who understood the importance of the Main Chance. While the situation was unpleasant, demonstrating himself as an effective commander in this position would put him in the highest circles of the regime, and Blaise Zabini was nothing if not a skilled social climber.</p><p>They showed him his cabinet first. The furniture was beautiful old mahogany, there were paintings of past naval engagements in it, a sitting couch, wooden end-tables, a fine four-poster bed. The ceiling also had visible pipes running across it, labelled according to their function. She had lost much from the days she had been the last Trans-Atlantic Liner.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then there were the inspections, the tours, the speeches by experienced men who were made nervous by the presence of the trim and handsome Slytherin Wizard—a man who could have them put to death in a heartbeat, despite his youth. Still, the First Sea Lord—that was a title which was retained, even if the application was mangled, under Voldemort’s regime—gave no appearance of cruelty, or indeed caring about the muggles enough to be cruel toward them. Captain Palliser gradually seemed to grow more comfortable around him, thinking that, in the course of getting his ticket punched by commanding the fleet, he might be a half-decent man as far as the recent commanders had gone. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>He had been quick to dismiss the men to their regular duties, too. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>It all seemed relatively normal, even positive, until they returned to the Lord’s quarters. Blaise turned toward Captain Palliser, and asked, still with that diffident tone in his voice, “is she ready for a sortie?”</p><p>“Yes. Four hours notice to get underway, M’Lord.”</p><p>“<span>Good,” Blaise chuckled. “Get your sleep while you can, Captain.” With that, he shut the steel hatch in Captain Palliser’s face—not like the man minded much. Wizards had treated him rather worse before. </span></p><p>But it was an enigma right up until, nine hours later, they received an emergency order to sail.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>East of Kalmar, Sweden</b>
</p><p>
  <b>29 January, 2004</b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The metaphorical equivalent of the </span>
  <em>Queen Elizabeth 2 </em>
  <span>converted into an aircraft carrier was currently 760 nautical miles away making steering way through the heavy pack ice </span>
  <span>south</span>
  <span>west of the Swedish island of Gotland. Named the </span>
  <em>Admiral Kornilov </em>
  <span>after the hero of the Crimean War, she was smaller than her cousin in the Red Banner Northern Fleet, but unlike the </span>
  <em>Admiral Kuznetsov, </em>
  <span>relied on KN-3 nuclear reactors for propulsion; in fact, she used the parts and materials of the engineering plant for the sixth cruiser of Projekt 1144 “</span>
  <span>Orlan” </span>
  <span>which had been scrapped at St. Petersburg several years before the war began, supplemented by some additional components and the catapults meant to be installed in the carrier </span>
  <em>Ulyanovsk </em>
  <span>which had been cancelled with the fall of the Union.</span>
</p><p>In short, she had been thrown together out of the bits and pieces of several naval projects, in a desperate state of urgency to create a new warship. She would have been finished as a member of the class of Projekt 1144 if they’d had the electronics; they didn’t, so she was a carrier instead, packed with Mig-29Ks.</p><p>
  <span>Following in her wake was a crisp line of destroyers, mostly of Projekt 956 Sarych (there was also a sole Projekt 1155.1 Fregat which had been towed away unfinished from the Yantar yards at Kaliningrad to Helsinki before the Oblast had fallen to Voldemort’s troops, and later completed by the Finns for the Russian Navy), but a few 956EMs originally meant for the Chinese. Those, in a note of pride for Hermione, hoisted the White Ensign, and made use of the remaining naval crews from the Morsmordre’s Black Sea Fleet who had not been needed to crew the HMS </span>
  <em>Galatea. </em>
  <span>As usual, the Russians should have liked to crew them on their own, but trained men were too useful to pass up.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Of course, it was too godawful cold to stay there looking at the ships for long. And the real star of the show at the moment was ahead of them, anyway. The </span>
  <em>50 let Pobedy, </em>
  <span>the nuclear powered icebreaker “50 Years Since Victory” was leading the way, with the other icebreakers of the </span>
  <span>Baltic Fleet around them, providing support, keeping the pack ice away from the lines of warships. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The grey sky was omnipresent above, but that was better than the perfect white-out that would exist if the clouds were to clear. A harsh wind ripped down across the bridge wing of the </span>
  <em>Admiral Kornilov, </em>
  <span>seeming to slice through the greatcoat and the uniform and the two layers of long underwear under the uniform that Hermione was wearing. The horizon seemed to disappear in a dizzying mirage of ice stretching toward infinity until it met with the clouds above. </span>
</p><p>The massive icebreaker was their secret weapon. It was ramming its way through the thick ice of the Baltic in a January kissed by nuclear winter, not stopping for anything, no need to back-and-ram as the lesser icebreakers might. Their course would take them to the north of the Danish island of Bornholm, screened from the European mainland and Voldemort’s forces, as much as they could be.</p><p>Once, in retreat during the First World War against the threat of seizure by the Germans, the Red Fleet had fallen back from Tallinn to Helsingfors—modern Helsinki—and then to Petrograd through the ice, in the Ice Cruise of the Baltic Fleet.</p><p>Now they were on another ice cruise—but it was an offensive, not a retreat. After turning to the west north of Bornholm, they would make for the Oresund.</p><p>Then the Kattegat.</p><p>Then the Skagerrak.</p><p>
  <em>Admiral Kornilov</em>
  <span>’s destination was the ice-free port of Stavanger on the southwest Norwegian coast, and with her, the whole of the Baltic Fleet. </span>
</p><p>They were breaking out.</p><p>A slight figure who seemed bundled in five layers emerged from the protection of the enclosed bridge, and visibly winced as the savage wind across the ice caught her, high on the tower of the carrier. Her black hair was caught by the wind, and whipped out behind her.</p><p>Hermione grinned.</p><p>
  <span>Bellatrix hated the sea after Azkaban. But between her sister’s plan and Hermione’s insistence at accompanying the fleet, the outcome had been preordained. Instead of taking the train to Stavanger, </span>
  <span>Bella had decided to risk the danger of the breakout, and come along. </span>
</p><p>“This, Granger, is too. Damned. Cold.” She muttered when she got close enough for her voice to carry over the wind. But there was a glint in her eyes. There was danger and chaos ahead, and for all that had changed, Bellatrix Black lived for such hours.</p><p>There was a laugh from the younger woman, leaning against the rail. “You’re loving every minute of it.”</p><p>“Except the cold part.”</p><p>“You’ve got at least ten warming charms on yourself.”</p><p>“I should have used twenty.”</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>The North Sea</b>
</p><p>
  <b>30 January, 2004</b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Palliser strained to look through the unending clouds of gloom on the horizon. There was a good chop, with the weather holding </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>a steady AM, or Arctic Maritime wind, which had dropped the barometer to 29 inches. The wind had picked up to 25 knots, the temperature from the north wind blowing across the decks dropping toward -10F. Ice was building up on the bows and the decks and the tower of the </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Inflexible</span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span> quite badly. For all that, it was only a Beaufort 6, and her flight deck was high enough that he was confident that if they turned two points to port </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>to put her bow to the wind</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>, he could cat his Typhoons off the deck. But they were kept below to keep them from icing, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>and if the wind hit a Beaufort 7, his only defence would be his missiles and his escorts. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>And his mages. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>For all of that, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>he was less concerned about the weather than about the command situation. Admiral Lowe had been left behind by the urgency to set sail, which meant that the new Lord of the Admiralty, whose experience with the sea he had no real idea of, was in personal command. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Through the grey and the whipping of the wind, the clouds cleared enough for him to see the </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Ark Royal. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>She had not be renamed, and the ship he had served as a First Officer on was struggling more than the </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Inflexible, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>but she was, indeed, holding formation, as they ploughed at 2</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>0</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>kts to the east out of the Firth. The operations of the brand new Kestrels on her decks, though, would be badly impacted.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Satisfied that she was not being pounded too hard with the beam sea, Palliser turned back inside to the enclosed bridge to take his tea and go to the chart room, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>leaving his greatcoat on a hook</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>. He was surprised to see that Lord Zabini was already there. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>M’lord Zabini.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Captain. I was reviewing the situation,” he answered mildly, and gestured to the maps. “If you’d care to summarise it.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Of course, M’lord.” He put the steaming mug of tea down. “So, you, of course, gave the orders, so I don’t need to…”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Quite, no need to summarise that.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>The Northern Fleet is now </span></span><span><span>located at 73 North, 28 degrees, 15 minutes east,” Palliser said simply. “Or was about twenty minutes ago, steaming due west at twenty-five knots. </span></span><em><span>Astute </span></em><span><span>read them as two carriers, three battlecruisers, eleven destroyers. But she was caught in a box by three Akulas and had to evade before she could position for a shot.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Blaise Zabini at least knew how to read a nautical chart. “Due north from North Cape and now moving west, Captain?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes, M’lord. About the same waters my grandfather helped sink the </span></span><em><span>Scharnhorst </span></em><span><span>in.” He did not comment on the relative difference in circumstances between himself and his grandfather. No man still leaving after six years of Voldemort would. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Is that so? Hmm.” He studied the map for a moment. “If you were going to break out into the Atlantic from the North Cape, where would you go?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Oh, the Denmark Strait, M’lord. There’d be no other way.” He looked longingly at his tea for a moment.</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Blaise registered faint bemusement. “Go ahead, Captain. Stay awake.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Thank you, M’lord.” He took a gulp and then stared at the chart again, and hazarded his opinion. After all, his new commander would either listen, or the situation would get bad fast. “I don’t think they’re trying to break out to the Atlantic, M’lord. I think they’re headed to </span></span><span><span>the </span></span><span><span>Trondheim </span></span><span><span>Fjord</span></span><span><span>.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Explain.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>It’s an ice-free, deep water harbour, much closer to our territories. It was the ideal position for a fleet-in-being during WWII; that’s where the </span></span><em><span>Tirpitz </span></em><span><span>became the ghost of the fjords, M’lord, the ship that wing after wing of bombers kept trying to sink, until finally it was managed, after years of eating up resources well in excess of what she was really worth. Both of the Northern Fleet’s carriers and all three battlecruisers, with eleven destroyers? That’s the entire fleet. They would be opening the northern coast to attack if it was lost, and I don’t think they’re planning on a breakout with that many ships, because they don’t have enough underway replenishment assets to support any kind of major operations with them. Trondheim, though? I remember the intelligence reports, the Russkies have put three regiments of Flankers there in the past four months. That’s enough to provide air cover to a fleet at anchor, even if the initial assessment had been that they were to provide an active escort to bomber raids on Britain. And without satellites, who knows how many SAM regiments they’ve positioned in the area. As many as they think is necessary, I suspect. With the railway across Sweden from Sundsvall, they can bring in supplies from Russia proper at will. I think they’re executing a strategic repositioning of the fleet to a new permanent base nearer to the area of operations.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Hmm. How far for them, and for us?” The lights flicked off Zabini’s dark robes, the chart room sharp with a dry heat threatening sweat under the massive layers that Palliser was wearing.</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>They’re six hundred and fifty nautical miles out from Trondheim, approximately,” Palliser answered after marking it off on the map. “We’re six hundred. We can force them to a surface action with the escorts, if we have to; we’d be badly outgunned, however. I don’t want to put our destroyers into the range of the SS-N-19s on their Kirovs. But I’m much more confident of our ability to strike them with the Buccaneers. If we turn due north now, we’ll pass near the Shetlands, so we can get support from the R--” He paused. “From the Air Force. Once we turn due north, we’ll be able to get aeroplanes off the deck, and the weather should ease within the next twelve hours. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Very good then, make it happen, Captain.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Thank you, M’lord. By your leave?”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Of course.”</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Palliser smiled faintly, and began to turn away to head onto the bridge and order the fleet to Course Zero-Zero-Zero. Due north. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>But then his commander’s words brought him to a halt for a moment, until both men grinned faintly at each other, despite the gulf of culture and power between them.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>It really ought to still be the Royal Air Force, shouldn’t it, Captain?” </span></span></p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>“<span><span>Your Grace, Duchess Narcissa, welcome to Norway.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>My thanks, Your Highness,” Narcissa acknowledged to Prince Haakon. The sharply cold wind on the tarmac at the airfield on Vigra swept across them both. Larissa followed Narcissa out of the aeroplane. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Lady </span></span><span><span>Larissa Naryshkina, </span></span><span><span>of the Naryshkin family of Boyars,</span></span><span><span>” Narcissa introduced, though Larissa came to attention—being in uniform—and offered the Prince, in the uniform of a Rear Admiral of the Royal Norwegian Navy, a sharp salute. </span></span><span><span>The Wizarding Naryshkin appellation of ‘Princely’ was self-styled to their closeness to the old Imperial family, and here in western Europe it would not be proper to push the matter. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Lady Larissa,” the Norwegian Prince offered to the non-Royal Russian Witch. Behind them, the engines of the IL-62M they had arrived in screamed to keep her warm. Officers assigned to rotations back in Russia would soon board and depart, if the weather held. A few trucks were clearing the taxiways of freshly fallen snow. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>T</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>hen a third woman joined them, watching the children, her eyes sharp, her appearance as composed as possible. She had to be, because she had finally given in, and accepted the reality of the fact that she had been drawn into this most dangerous game that her sister was playing. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>And my sister, Lady Andromeda Black Tonks, with my niece Lady Delphini, and my nephew, Theodore.” </span></span><em><span>Lady Delphini. </span></em><span><span>Of course, it was perfectly true; Bellatrix was the head of the House Black, and Delphini was her heir. Properly, they were ranked with Earls. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>With the greetings complete, they made haste into the waiting room of the airport, which was now converted to a military airfield for a regiment of Russian Su-27s. It was kept hot, for the operational crews now filling it </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>(And coordinated with the battalion of S-400 missiles now posted around the Gjosund)</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>, and there was Russian tea available. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>How is your father, Your Highness?” Narcissa asked politely as they took tea inside, with Norwegian pepperkakes, which were a more than adequate accompaniment which certainly delighted the children. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>He rallies, with deep faith in God, and confidence in our ultimate victory,” Prince Haakon answered after a moment’s pause. “But he is also comfortable.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>He has liberated the whole of his country,” Narcissa answered, trying to be gentle, since the Prince’s words spoke the truth eloquently enough. “Few men may claim so much in this hour of tribulation. He deserves to be comfortable, after that.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Thank you, Duchess Narcissa.” He paused for a moment, with his own tea. “You intend to duplicate the affair, do you not?” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Narcissa looked around them for a moment, and smiled regally. “Well, we’ll talk about it when we reach Ålesund.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Of course, Your Grace.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>An hour later, they were there, and in one of the fine Art Nouveau hotels from the Kaiser Wilhelm’s rebuilding of the city, as a gift to the Norwegian people, after the great fire of January 1904, a little more than exactly 100 years before. He had vacationed near the city, and so had contributed to its reconstruction. Afterwards, he had continued his tradition of summer vacations in the Norwegian fjords nearby—right up until the fateful summer of 1914. The German Empire had fallen, but the Art Nouveau buildings remained, and with them, the street named “Keiser Wilhelms gate” that the hotel fronted. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Here, with the Norwegian Royal House providing the accommodations, some real Scandinavian coffee had been obtained. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>While they drank it, a folk singers’ group presented a set of traditional songs, including the 18</span>
  </span>
  <sup>
    <span>
      <span>th</span>
    </span>
  </sup>
  <span>
    <span> century poem </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Zinklars Vise, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>a great patriotic tune about Scottish mercenaries travelling overland to Sweden who were annihilated in the Norwegian mountains in 1612, and the much more lighthearted </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Dronning Ellisiv, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>about Harald Hardrada’s Russian wife. Narcissa was no friend to the memory of Harald Hardrada, but Larissa appreciated it, and such were the vagaries of fate, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>that enemies and bad endings of ancestors, were today the stories of triumph of allies, who fought wand to wand with you. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>A</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>fter they were dismissed, and a Norwegian Ministry Witch swept the room for bugs and spells, Prince Haakon looked seriously to Duchess Narcissa, who simply nodded, and did not wait for some preamble to explain the situation. “Your are correct, Your Highness. We are preparing to regain Britain. We have men in the right places, who are laying the final plans now. In a few months, the entire situation will be together, and the spring will, if fate is with us, place our forces on Britain’s strand.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Haakon raised his glass in a salute. “I wish you as much fortune as we had, then, Your Grace. We have not yet received a briefly on the final plan, which I assume is in some months?”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes. For the moment, all that is happening is the breakout of the fleet.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>To the Trondheimsfjorden?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Oh, well, the Northern Fleet is going there,” Narcissa laughed. “But I’m talking about the Baltic Fleet. My apologies, Your Highness, but this had to be kept secret until the operation was well underway, and it is only now, in person, that I can tell you. The preparations were carefully concealed, but we are ready to support two fleets, one at the Trondheim Fjord, and one at Stavanger.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Then, let me call for wine, Duchess Narcissa, so we may drink confusion to our enemies.” What he didn’t add was that the Baltic Fleet might well need it. </span></span></p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>The Kattegat,</b>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <b>31 January 2004. </b>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>It was due east of Frederikshavn on the northern part of the Jutland, at the narrowest point of the Kattegat, athwarts the island of Læsø, that the game was up. The fleet, under strict radio and electronics emissions silence, had bid farewell to the </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>50 Let Pobedy </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>and the other icebreakers, which had turned back toward Copenhagen. The Kattegat was still open water in late January, though the fringes of land had frozen, and the ice was spreading, in the aftereffects of the nuclear war; by the end of February, even all the shores and fjords of the Skagerrak would be frozen, and the ice would stretch from Skagen to Gothenburg.</span>
  </span>
</p><p><span><span>They had chosen the date of the breakout to make it seem impossible, but to not quite be really impossible. And that was badly needed now, as Hermione looked to the west, from an aircraft carrier—hideously vulnerable to enemy gunfire when in confined water—that was speeding to the northwest. It was</span></span> <span><span>Læsø that was the problem. Even with experienced Swedish pilots guiding the fleet, the easternmost ship in the combined force could stand only 39km from the island of Læsø, which was easy range for the Morsmordre 155mm field cannon stationed on the island to support the garrison.</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>When her magnification spell clearly showed the men running to the guns across the packed snow, she knew that the game was up. She </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>picked up the headset and </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>activated the intercom from the bridge wing to the bridge. “</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Admiral Vershinin, we are about to come under attack from </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>Læsø.”</span>
    </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span><span>Councilor Granger, this is Admiral Vershinin. I have General Black with me. Shall we break radio silence?” </span></span></span></p><p>“<span><span><span>I recommend it. They will begin firing in another few minutes. Go to quarters and prepare all the witches. And signal the Second Bomber Aviation Regiment—we will need support.”</span></span></span></p><p>“<span><span><span>Understood. Stand by to shield the fleet to your best ability, Councilor. I have rung bells for twenty-nine knots, and we are going to action stations.” </span></span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>Deep in the hull, the nuclear reactors saw their control rods rise. Saturated steam from the nuclear plant was superheated through the secondary diesel firing boilers, and the governors on the turbines were released. The screws turned faster through the bitterly cold waters of the Kattegat, and Hermione, even through her thick gloves, could feel the shudder in the hull as the revolutions on the screws rapidly increased—causing cavitation—transmitted right up to the bridge wing railings. </span>
    </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>With a shrug, she turned back toward the west. A rippling of a dozen flashes signaled that the field cannon on </span>
    </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>Læsø </span>
    </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>were firing. She raised her wand to the sky and cast a broad-effect </span>
    </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>
      <span>Protego. </span>
    </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>Four other wizards and witches on the carrier joined her in expanding its reach and strength. </span>
    </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>And then there was a sixth wand. With a bright laugh only a half-step removed from her cackle, Bellatrix joined her. </span>
    </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>The <em>First </em>Battle of the North Sea had begun. </span>
    </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>Only a very select group of people, clustered on the bridge wing of the </span>
    </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <em>
      <span>Admiral Kornilov, </span>
    </em>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>
      <span>knew that Narcissa had rigged the deck in advance. </span>
    </span>
  </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. "First Sea Lord" is a traditional title of the ranking Admiral in charge of naval operations in the UK. But here, it's been appropriated so that the Sea Lords are wizards, and the regular Admirals are muggles serving under them. </p><p>2. Information on the various projects of Russian ships are available on Wikipedia -- but in segments from a Russian or allied POV, I use the Russian Project numbers, and in Western segments, I use the NATO code names and class names. So for example, Projekt 1144 Orlan is the Kirov-class in the West.</p><p>3. Yes, I did seriously have the QE2 ocean liner converted into an aircraft carrier. I may ultimately succeed in getting one of my ship nerd friends to draw a picture of this.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0056"><h2>56. The Breakout</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Breakout</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Even after they passed Læsø and the guns there, they still had to pass additional batteries posted at Skagen on the northernmost tip of the Jutland Peninsula. The fleet held 29kts as they moved to the northwest through the Kattegatt.</p><p>Hermione and Bellatrix were shoulder to shoulder, looking to port, to the west—across the deck of the carrier. Her aeroplanes were struck below, and that was good, as the batteries on Læsø had managed to slip three shells past them. There was a crew still fighting the fire which had started aft, but, it was aft, so the wind across the deck as the <em> Admiral Kornilov </em>moved at speed kept it confined to the stern of the ship.</p><p>It was small enough either of them could easily extinguish it, but they were busy at the moment. “The problem is there’s so many of them!” Bella exclaimed with a laugh. Her wand work was always unpredictable, and Hermione was pressed hard to keep up and keep their spells coordinated.</p><p>“Muggles, or shells?” Hermione asked a bit trenchantly.</p><p>But Bella’s eyes just flashed in bemusement. “Idiots trying to stop us,” she corrected, and it made even Hermione grin.</p><p>Sometimes it seemed like half of War was just a variation on <em> Protego </em> for a witch, though . But Bellatrix could still layer and manipulate the spells to derange even complex attacks with an airy confidence. Every one of the guns was firing at the <em> Kornilov— </em>she was the largest ship in the breakout force by far—and the shells splashing columns high in the water, the smoke in the air—much of it intentionally laid by the destroyers and frigates to cover her—was completed by the crazy ricochet of projectiles, while others detonated in air.</p><p>Hermione was proud when she kept pace, feeling some of the crackling, competitive energy from the shorter, older witch. The Brightest Witch of Her Age… As Hermione’s wand snapped, she couldn’t help but ask. “Who called you the Brightest first?”</p><p>“Slughorn! He probably wanted to ingratiate himself with my father.” Bellatrix cackled, as another spell shot from her wand. “You?”</p><p>“McGonagall!” Hermione answered.</p><p>“Of course she would, you fucking Gryffindor. Nothing brings out house rivalries quicker than some trite informal title.”</p><p>“Trite informal title that means a lot to you, Bella!”</p><p>“And you, Granger!” It was always Granger when Bella got worked up, but at least now it was reliably Granger.</p><p>Hermione’s eyes had never left the scene to the southwest. The guns firing from Skagen were like a painting, puffs of white in the distance, columns of water churned white close by. Particularly with the banter between them, it did not at all feel like combat. She could see the explosions and fires from where the Su-24s supporting them were hitting targets, both near and far. One of their jobs was to suppress any land-based anti-ship missile batteries.</p><p>Then there were the ships of the squadron themselves, closer in, making time through the water, their wakes trailing out long, smoke generators running hard to obscure them from the enemy. They held their active countermeasures in reserve, against the real danger—truck-mounted anti-ship missiles being brought up to engage them. The destroyers were moving at thirty-four knots, zig-zagging and laying smoke, while the <em> Admiral Kornilov </em>ran flat out in a straight line at 29kts behind the cover they provided.</p><p>There was a fundamental challenge, a tension between magic and technology, in defending the ship. The powerful radars of the Kashtan CIWS mounts could be brought up to target incoming missiles, if they were launched from trucks along the shore—and it was hard to blow up every truck in the north of Jutland. Would they get all of them? If they didn’t, the unpredictable combination of magic cast on the deck and the sophisticated electronics on the ship being brought on-line was inherently a risk, and with the two being mutually exclusive, you had to choose one or the other to defend each ship with. So the choice came down to when it was witches or technology that would be more effective in a particular situation. Soon enough, they were confronted with the choice.</p><p>It was one of Hermione’s charms that gave her the warning, an enchanted bracelet on her left wrist that glowed without heat. She grimaced. “Bella, there’s something else coming in!”</p><p>“Mmmn, they’re coming for us hard,” Bellatrix spun in the direction that Hermione pointed. Despite her comment, she was grinning, as if she knew a secret that no-one else knew.</p><p>The ship’s speakers crackled: “<em>Missile launch detected! – at least four signatures!</em>”</p><p>“Hermione, Intruder Periculum,” the elder witch instructed after a moment, a particularly devious smile cross her face as she leaned upon the railing.</p><p>“That’s just a – okay.” She cast the warning charm. It was wide effect, release a starburst of red sparks in the sky when it was passed through. And the missiles were coming on fast.</p><p>Bellatrix grabbed the bridge intercom. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t break your radars,” she teased in Russian, a hint of mocking in her voice. She was, as ever, far more confident of magic than any of technology. And she clearly had something in mind. It was a testament to how far things had come, too, that the Admiral trusted her implicitly. There was no debate, just a single word acknowledgement. Then Bella raised her wand and began to prepare an incantation. Hermione looked to her sharply for a minute, and then took a breath and decided to trust her.</p><p>The missiles passed through the zone of warning, and blossoms of red sparkles in the darkened sky illuminated their course for them in a flash. Tens of kilometres away, there were still only seconds to respond, and Hermione’s magic had done her part. She had to trust that Bellatrix was not going to allow the ship that they were on to be hit hard by the cruise missiles. In fact, like it or night, thousands of Russian sailors were essentially dependent on the pureblood witch’s estimation of her own abilities actually being correct.</p><p>Bellatrix had her targets, and the arc of her wand was now completed sharply. Fat bolts of purple and red and blue lighting arced from the leaden clouds hanging low in the sky and converged across the horizon, on certain courses. “<em>Elektra Testuda</em>!” She cried, culminating the spell with a gleeful and genuinely happy cackle.</p><p>Hermione’s eyes widened. <em>She said she hadn’t performed her magic of electricity since Azkaban. She never said that she could perform a defensive spell in it, either. A defensive spell in electric magic! </em>For a moment, she felt just the childlike awe of seeing Bellatrix do something absolutely new, which confirmed her talent which had won her the title of the Brightest Witch of Her Age those decades before.</p><p>Electric magic. It was something that the murderer, the terrorist, the Death Eater had never done, but that <em> her </em> Bella just <em> had. </em></p><p>The missiles went wild, not because of a physical effect or a curse, but because of the electrical field ruining their guidance systems and computers, causing a kind of directed chaos which Bellatrix prolonged with the motion of her wand, driving them up and then down, plunging them into the sea, and sending others spinning around, back to the south, back toward Jutland.</p><p>Bellatrix nodded archly as the other wizards cheered her display of power. A second salvo of missiles came in, and again, the fat bolts of lightning were conjured as the flashy, outward symbol of an electrical field effect across the battlefield, which seized control of the circuits in the incoming Harpoon missiles. With her banner of windswept hair streaming behind her, she conducted an orchestra of energy within the circuits of the missiles, and diverted the second group.</p><p><em> There’s eight, </em> Hermione thought, bringing the warning charms back up again. The MinKol wizards and witches were continuing their regular shielding against the incoming artillery fire, which certainly hadn’t stopped. The sea battlefield still spread around them. The destroyers were on the edge of the area of protection, but they needed to be there to properly screen the <em> Admiral Kornilov. </em>So far, though, Bellatrix had protected them as well.</p><p>Now the enemy understood something unexpected had happened. They fired their last two salvoes—another eight missiles—simultaneously in an attempt to overwhelm whatever this defence was. Bellatrix smirked and laughed, as if the challenge to her skill only amused her. But it <em> was </em>twice the difficulty, now.</p><p>The warning charms alerted in starbursts of red across the sky, like flares blossoming in patterns, Hermione’s magic marking the positions for Bella, so that she could call forth her power across the right area of effect. One after the other, she sent the missiles turning back or plunging into the sea, almost a dance with her wand, manipulating the circuitry across an invisible bridge of magic in the air connecting her wand and its motions into the input controls and sensor feeds of the missiles.</p><p>For seven of them, it worked just fine. For the eighth, it wandered too far outside the area of effect. The defending ship was one of the <em> Sovremenny-</em>class destoryers, Projekt 956 “Sarych”. She took the missile well aft, in the hangar, with a crack of yellow light and a flaring explosion in red, a column of smoke rising to mingle with that she was intentionally creating aft.</p><p>Hermione could see parts of the ship rising, consumed in the flames. She could tell the destroyer, moving at high speed, at once caught on fire. She knew that dozens of men were killed or mortally injured in a heartbeat. But it was so much more distant than war on land for her, too. The destroyer hove out to starboard, to the east, crossing behind them. There were no more missiles forthcoming. The shells of the enemy were starting to fall well short, too. They had passed out of range of the battery at Skagen.</p><p>The expression on Bella’s face had fallen. “Well, it was fifteen out of sixteen,” she muttered. “And their job was to protect the <em> Admiral Kornilov. </em> We protected the <em> Admiral Kornilov.</em>”</p><p>“It was,” Hermione agreed. They both stood at the ready, until they were freezing in the bitter cold, waiting for the resumption of combat. Just because it seemed like the fighting was over didn’t mean it actually was.</p><p>Hermione watched the destroyer past behind them, and then make her way to the north, slowing, but staying underway. Based on their course and speed, she expected they had been ordered to make for shelter in the Oslofjord, probably so that after repairs were completed, they could join the rest of the fleet at Stavanger. Gothenburg was much closer, but would mean accepting that the ship was bottled up in the Kattegatt.</p><p>Several of the MinKol personnel on the bridge turned away and went below-decks, summoned to help fight the fire aft. That kept Bellatrix and Hermione on duty as the temperature continued to fall as they stood out deeper into the Skagerrak, and the land behind them to the south disappeared. The fires, with magical help, were quickly extinguished, and temporary steel matting was welded into place over the shell-holes in the after flight deck. The arresting gear were checked out and confirmed, and an hour and a half after they had cleared the batteries at Skagen and broken out into the North Sea, the first of the Mig-29Ks were coming up onto the deck, loaded for strike with laser-guided bombs. Because in naval combat between ships, there would frequently be an opportunity for only a single mission, and it must be either win or die, the Naval Aviation forces received all the most advanced remaining technology for strike purposes.</p><p>The fleet now turned to the southwest off Arandal on the coast of Aust-Agder in Norway. They would be able to stay at least one hundred kilometres away from Jutland at all points from here. The fleet now consisted of the <em> Admiral Kornilov </em> with six Project 956 destroyers, most of them of the modified type originally intended for China; one Projekt 11551 <em> — </em> the <em> Admiral Chabanenko— </em> as well as the frigate <em> Neustrashimyy</em>, three <em> Talwar</em>-class frigates originally built for India, and two older frigates of Projekt 1135 . Fourteen ships breaking out into the North Sea in formation, no longer zig-zagging but instead holding 29kts to the Southwest as the strike squadron of Migs was spotted on the deck and the first were positioned on the catapults. The <em> Kornilov </em>was the only Russian carrier to have them, and they made this operation so much more possible, because it increased the loads they could carry into combat.</p><p>Hermione distantly watched the flight group begin to launch their strike, the roar of the jets drowning out any ability to talk with anyone on the wing of the bridge, the steam swirling off the catapult track and trailing behind the ship. They had been so focused on the tactical engagement that Hermione wasn’t even sure what they were attacking! But it didn’t matter, that was the Admiral’s job. The crew cheered as the heavily laden strike aircraft hurled down the deck and into the leaden sky, the St. Andrew’s Cross whipping from the yardarm on the side of the funnel, in the sharp cold wind across the deck.</p><p>What did matter was the intensely pale colour that had come over Bella’s skin, the way that, standing watch, and now quiet after the missile hit on the ship, she was starting to shiver. The sailors talking around them (before the air operations cut them off) had identified the damaged ship as the <em> Bespokoynyy. </em>‘Restless’. Perhaps her name fit. Hermione turned back to her. “It will be fine. They will make port, I am sure of it. Your magic saved us all. I admit, that you’re upset about the lives of four hundred muggles matters to me,” Hermione offered a smile.</p><p>“Oh damn it, I’m just cold, Granger. And I’m not upset about the lives of four hundred muggles, I’m upset that I wasn’t <em>perfect. </em>I finally did it, but it wasn’t <em>perfect.</em>”</p><p>Hermione stepped closer to the shorter woman. “Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough, especially in combat. Also, that was the first time you had ever used that spell in earnest, wasn’t it?”</p><p>“It was,” Bellatrix admitted with a shake of her head. “I had …” She shook her head violently and turned away.</p><p>The All-Clear finally sounded. They might come under attack again soon, but now, the witches were not needed for a moment; it was time to eat, to drink tea, to rest.</p><p>“Come on, Bella,” Hermione insisted. The other woman gave no resistance as they went into the interior of the ship’s tower again, which was almost luxuriously hot from the steam heat off the reactor. She helped the exhausted older witch doff her greatcoat before she started sweating. Bella in her British Army uniform was quite distinctive to the other uniforms aboard, but also attended immediate respect because of her rank.</p><p>However, she just waved aside the salutes with her gloved left hand and headed promptly for the Officer’s Mess. The glove essentially never came off, and Hermione had made peace with respecting Bella’s shame over it. Regardless, she was ravenous, and there was a big hot dish of <em> Makaroni po-flotski </em>and countless blazing hot carafes of tea lined up on counters which had metal racks to keep them from falling off as the ship rolled in the sea, in a room painted some off yellow with a mass of pipes running the ceiling—but there were paintings on the walls, and tablecloths on the tables. It was an officer’s mess; and both food and tea seemed like an impossible luxury after the hours and hours of fighting and freezing in that strangely distant sort of battle which was defending a ship at sea. It didn’t seem like they had been doing much, but the warmth reminded her just how much its absence had cut into her bones.</p><p>By now in her life, Hermione well understood that feeling of exhaustion from a sudden release of tension. It had felt clinical, isolated, and distant to fight like they just had, but the slightest mistake could lead to instant death. So it felt like you were playing a game—catch the artillery shell with one spell or another, see how fast you could cast <em> Protego— </em>but in a single heartbeat, you knew inside that it could instantly turn into a very real death.</p><p>Hermione realised she had been shivering, just like Bellatrix. But the steaming glasses of tea and the plates banished any other thought. She didn’t even care what the meat in the dish was, it was just hot, and delicious, with the thin sauce, all velvety, coating the pasta which meant it had been cooked with some flour, and of course, the butter, caramelized onion, and parsley. There was some varenye for the tea, and Hermione might as well have been in heaven, the fruit it had been made with hardly mattered. She probably scalded her throat a little with how fast she ate and drank, and she didn’t care one damned bit. It felt impossibly good, like there wasn’t enough food in the world to sate one’s hunger or tea to quench one’s thirst, so she’d just eat and drink forever—you’d get quite fat if you always felt that way, but of course, it was really the way you felt only after you had been working desperately hard in the cold for hour after hour. There was no other feeling like that in all the world.</p><p>Hermione’s frantic eating and drinking slowed. She felt sated as few things could accomplish. <em> Anyone who thinks chocolate is better than sex must have eaten it after running around dancing outside for twelve hours in - </em> <em> 30C, </em> she snarked to herself. “Bella, to get back to what I was saying before… That was <em> amazing. </em>I want to learn the Elektraworking myself.” She spoke in English, to give them some privacy.</p><p>Bellatrix didn’t answer. She just got up, and refilled her tea, and returned to the seat, looking down at it, and ignoring Hermione.</p><p>“Bella… I know you’re obsessive. And right then and right there, you were probably…”</p><p>“Obsessed with being perfect,” Bellatrix acknowledged with a grimace. “Don’t think of blaming me for it, Granger. I was <em> required </em>to be perfect as the eldest Black daughter, growing up.”</p><p>“Then how did you ever start to develop electricity-working yourself? You had to have made mistake after mistake to finally get it right.” Hermione leaned forward. Magic <em> was </em> trial and error. She wanted to say, <em> without Voldemort you could have been the most famous Witch of the 20</em><sup><em>th </em> </sup> <em> century, you could have invented an entire class of Magic. They’d have had to add another Professoriate at Hogwarts, and you’d be the Professor. </em>Hermione knew better than to say such a thing, though. It would either enrage Bella or crush her feelings, or, most likely, both.</p><p>But Bellatrix still responded sharply. She dropped her tea onto the table with a clatter. It landed upright, and there was just a splash, across that gloved hand, and a fleck which hit Hermione’s chin and burned for a brief moment. Bellatrix, though, had grabbed Hermione’s lapels, and leaned in close. “Hermione Granger, I was comfortable enough to risk making mistakes then because I was <em> loved. </em>And I dared to test defending the fleet like this because …” She trailed off, unable to say it even now, when they were officially in a relationship and her sisters approved of it.</p><p>Hermione grinned. “Because you love me?” She hazarded, and then waved a hand at someone making a half-hearted move to get up (you generally let flag officers do whatever they wanted), and switched to Russian: “It’s fine, the General just gets intense.”</p><p>“I should stupefy the lot of them and then obliviate every single one,” Bella muttered, sinking back into her chair with a look of disgust that so many muggles had witnessed that between the two of them. “Come on, we’re both done with the food, let’s go talk somewhere else.” She got up, and Hermione followed her; both women topped their tea off before leaving the mess.</p><p>Right to Bella’s cabin, the larger one, of course. It was the same size as the Admiral’s. The chairs were upholstered. The bed was big enough, that if they wanted to risk being naked when the ship came under attack again—they were still at stations, just relaxed from imminent battle condition, and Hermione knew it was just a matter of time—they could do something amazingly stupid.</p><p><em> Actually, that’s a dumb thought. You’re too tired to even take your clothes off, </em>Hermione told herself. It was the tiredness that made such dumb thoughts…</p><p>Bellatrix kicked back in one of the chairs with her glass of tea, and regarded Hermione archly. “You keep reassuring me, but the reality is, I experimented with your life, my life, the lives of all the MinKol personnel in the fleet, and oh yes, the muggles.”</p><p>“Every new weapon, tactic, spell, it’s all got to be tried in combat sooner or later. You never told me that your electric magic included combat spells, though,” Hermione shrugged. “I don’t think it was risky. Do you think the CIWS could have gotten 15 for 16? I just wished you’d trusted me to go over the plan in advance.”</p><p>Bella gritted her teeth. “I’m only turning that magic to war, because of Delphi, because of you. In the end, there’s nothing that war doesn’t touch.”</p><p>Hermione sucked in her breath, her face seized in a moment of pensive wonder. “Did you hide it from The Dark Lord?”</p><p>“Don’t be ridiculous, Granger,” Bellatrix rolled her eyes. “I never explained it all to the Dark Lord because he wouldn’t be interested, because it was magic that was mostly for manipulating things from the muggle world. Caring enough about the electrical world to make it a study of magic—hah, that was my perversion.” She laughed, that manic laugh. “Not my only one.”</p><p>“I’m not a perversion, thank you,” Hermione answered tartly. “In fact, beyond the fact that you need to work on calling me Hermione or ‘Mione or something else to reflect the fact we’ve already told your daughter I’m going to be her second mum, it might just be time for you to realise that you’re making an assumption. You <em> thought </em> he wouldn’t care. But in fact, for all his pretensions about the purity of the Wizarding world, the Dark Lord would have happily gobbled up any technique or tactic which gave him more power. You were keeping something to yourself because it <em> mattered </em>to you, no matter how you rationalised it.”</p><p>Bella stared at her, her eyes rather wide, her hands unsteady on her glass of tea. Finally, she grimaced. “Don’t try to psychometricise me, Hermione, or whatever that muggle pseudoscience is. That’s not what I want our relationship to be about.”</p><p>“Psychoanalyze,” Hermione corrected with a grin. She didn’t need Bellatrix to admit it, for it to be confirmed in her own heart.</p><p>“Just what I need to waste my brain on—muggle neologisms.”</p><p>Then the tender moment, tea and warmth was all cut off with a jerk; the alarm sounded; the battle was going again.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes:</p><p>1. Because of the canonical interference of magic with electricity, I assume that the manipulation of electricity was a recent discovery, so far only known to Bellatrix--she is the brightest witch of her age for a reason! But forms of magic dealing with subjects outside of the norm will be a feature as we move forward, and not just here. </p><p>2. Project 956 Sarych is called the Sovremenny-class destroyer in the west.</p><p>3. Project 1155 Fregat and Project 11551 Fregat-M are the Udaloy/Udaloy II class, in this case, the only Udaloy II.</p><p>4. The Talwar class was identified in the western style because this is what the Indians do; in Russian service they would be called Project 11356.</p><p>5. Project 1135 is the Krivak class.</p><p>6. The Neustrashimyy is the sole ship of her class here--Project 11540. The hulls of the others would have been lost when Kaliningrad was overrun by the Morsmordre. </p><p>7. CIWS, "Close In Weapons System". In Russian service these are the AK-630, a 30mm gatling gun, and the Kashtan mount, which combines anti-missile missiles with two 30mm gatlings in the same mount. </p><p>8. On to another naval subject which is much less military. Have a recipe for Makaroni po-Flotski! It's extremely simple: https://www.olgasflavorfactory.com/recipes/main-course/makaroni-po-flotski-macaroni-navy-style/</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0057"><h2>57. Shadow-boxing</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>1 February, 2004</b>
</p><p>
  <b>100KM NNE of Unst, Shetland Islands</b>
</p><p> </p><p><span><span>Captain Palliser was looking across the plotting map with Blaise, </span></span><span><span>while outside the light was fading, slowing obscuring the grey waves, flecked with white, that sometimes appeared as the great carrier slowly rolled.</span></span> <span><span>The maps clearly laid out the current situation. F</span></span><span><span>rom their current position, they could launch a strike which would hit either the group to the south, or to the north, with full loads. With the steam catapults the </span></span><em><span>Inflexible </span></em><span><span>was fitted with, she could easily get her group into the air with </span></span><span><span>enough fuel for a combat radius of 550km; so, from </span></span><span><span>a superficial </span></span><span><span>point of view, it was ideal. They were one proper carrier facing three, but the two Russian ships to the north had ski-jumps and couldn’t get their machines airborne with full loads of fuel and arms. </span></span><span><span>Also, Palliser could commit his entire group in one go; the Kestrels on the </span></span><em><span>Invincibles </span></em><span><span>would provide air cover for the Taskforce, so it was not really </span></span><span><span>three on one.</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>T</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>heir latest information showed the Russian Baltic Fleet off Farsund just west of the southernmost point in Norway, holding 29kts to the west. The shore defences in Jutland had reported that they had sunk two destroyers </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>and heavily damaged the carrier</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>, but Palliser knew their information was likely inaccurate, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>especially the later, because the RAF had already reported a strike package moving south</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>west</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> that had originated from a position near Kristiansand where the latest intelligence reports did not place a Russian military airfield; it was the correct size for the package from the new Baltic carrier. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>T</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>here were only two targets to the southwest of Kristiansand: The North Sea Patrol Squadron, which was coming up with a smattering of ex-NATO frigates, corvettes and missile boats to support their Taskforce against the Baltic Fleet’s breakout, and, of course, the fortress of Azkaban. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>The dreaded reputation of Azkaban had permeated them all, but in fact, it was not clear what it was, other than the fact that all of the defence charts prepared by Voldemort’s Ministry of Defence banned approach within 50 nautical miles, and implied that the fortress could command most of the North Sea with some kind of magical weaponry. If the Russians were attacking it head-on, having the excellent intel that Palliser knew they had, they were exceptionally bold men in those aeroplanes. He put his money on a strike against the North Sea Patrol Squadron, instead.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>B</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>laise Zabini stood with a cup of tea in hand, looking at the map. He had expressed no surprise when the Baltic Fleet had been detected in the Kattegat twelve hours before. But, he expressed no surprise about anything. The man was certainly calm, even in very challenging circumstances; in fact, Captain Palliser would call him as cool as ice. But if he calmly made the right decisions, he would be far better than most of the wizards who had ever been rotated through to command the fleet. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Or something more. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Blaise finally shrugged. “Our aeroplanes would have to fly over Rogaland to hit the enemy fleet to the south, would they not?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>They would, M’lord.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Blaise nodded, and turned back to the mirror which let him communicate much more directly with the mainland. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>H</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>edwig Jugson, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>daughter </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>of a rather prominent Death Eater, was the overall defence force commander, and </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>s</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>he was clearly not happy; Captain Palliser was content to slink into the background, and let Blaise speak.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Have you engaged the shore defences at Stavanger?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I don’t have the squadrons to attack them,” the witch answered defensively. “There’s a full regiment of S-400 missiles there, supporting two fighter regiments of Su-27s.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>In fact, the position of the fleet off the Shetlands was </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>not </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>ideal, precisely because of the strength of the enemy position at Stavanger. Blaise sniffed. “I am out of position because of bad reconnaissance by the Jutland Air Operations Division. The Russian Baltic Fleet should have been detected near Bornholm, not after it had already broken through the pack ice. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Hedwig, I </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>need </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>you to attack Stavanger, or I won’t be able to support the North Sea Squadron.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>H</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>edwig sniffed. “I don’t care about the North Sea Squadron. I sent a team of wizards to raid Stavanger already, Blaise, and they accomplished </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>nothing. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>MinKol was waiting for them in force.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>As anyone sane would be. You should have relied on your air assets. They’re expendable, wizards are not.” He took another sip of his tea. “How would you support the North Sea Squadron then?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Use them as bait, have them fall back toward Azkaban. If the weapons on Azkaban can destroy the Russian Baltic Fleet, this will still be a victory. Launch your own strike against the Northern Fleet instead.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Is that your… Instruction, to the Navy?” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hedwig glared for a moment with dark eyes. “Yes.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Very well.” He tipped a bemused salute, and waved his wand. The image vanished. “Well, we have our orders.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>We’re leaving the Baltic Fleet in our rear. What if they don’t take the bait?”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Yes, exactly. It’s only prudent to give us enough sea range so that strike packages from both the Northern and Baltic Fleets can’t hit us at the same time, Captain,” Blaise agreed. “Turn to course three-zero-zero and open up the range. If the Baltic Fleet comes in behind us, we can refuel and rearm in Scapa Flow instead of Rosyth. Tell the pilots it will be at least another hour before we launch, so they’re to leave their aeroplanes and eat. We will turn to course zero-four-five and launch at dusk against the Trondheimsfjord.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Night attack?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>It will minimise the casualties, and preserve our options.” </span></span></p><p>
  <em>
    <span>R</span>
    <span>are enough for one of you to care about those things, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>Palliser thought. In truth, he was grateful. It was a sensible decision, if far more cautious than he had expected. But without Admiral Lowe here to advise him, Blaise Zabini was in actual command of the operation and he did not have the experience with naval operations—therefore, he was deferring to Hedwig, who was the overall Area Defence Commander, and also, he was acting sensibly, being cautious about the situation and avoiding risk. Once, in another life, Palliser would have encouraged him to attack more aggressively. Catching even the two Russian carriers in the Northern Fleet would be a great victory, despite the risk. His men would press home the attack, even with thirty jets against the entire enemy fleet, confident that the Royal Navy could deliver a victory as it had in many past wars, regardless of the odds. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>But this wasn’t the Royal Navy, and in his heart of hearts, he would sooner be in command of one of those Russian carriers himself. Arthur Palliser came to attention and saluted. “Of course. M’lord. I will be </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>making the course change </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>shortly. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Hmm.</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>” </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>He looked again at the distances to the Northern Fleet’s position and the Trondheimsfjord. “You know, M’lord, I think that if we wait two hours, we may be able to get them already in the Fjord, as they enter. They won’t be able to manoeuvre, then.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Blaise </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>looked at him, and then grinned. “That would be ideal actually.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Palliser </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>felt satisfied that he might have made a sensible suggestion, and counted it good enough for the circumstances. Then he </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>stepped out for the bridge. “Fleet signals: Steer course three-zero-zero, maintain fleet speed of twenty-five knots. Inflexible Air group to rotate men for food in the aviator’s mess, maintain the squadrons at Ready Ten.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Through the gloomy sky of the Norwegian Sea in February, the squadron sailed on. 300km away on the storm-swept coast of Norway, the next step in the plan unfolded. </span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>
    <span>1 </span>
    <span>February, 2004</span>
  </b>
</p><p>
  <b>
    <span>The Island of Sula, Norway. </span>
  </b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>T</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>here was a simple, beautiful house with two stories and a large open deck—presently covered with snow—at 500 metres elevation </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>in the hills of the island of Sula</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> to the south of Ålesund, overlooking Molvær and the harbour </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>from a position not far from the summit of Mount Vardane.</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> With the windows facing to the north, it was already dark when Narcissa and Andromeda took dinner with the children. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Fjords and islands and open fields of grass clinging to the sides of mountains and ridges were all around in sweeping views that had faded into nothingness, into the darkness of cities where mandatory blackouts were enforced, even when the electricity worked. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Whomever had occupied it and built it originally was forgotten in the tumult of the war, and abandoned during the occupation, the Government had provided it to Narcissa while she was present for the operations. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>After dinner, the two women went into the Library, which had been converted into a planning room. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>They were greeted there by an FSB officer, who introduced himself as ‘Colonel Kabanov’, Narcissa remembered Bellatrix mentioning his name; with him was a witch, in the uniform of the Norwegian Army, with dark hair but sharply pale skin. “Turid Olafsdottir.” Many Norwegian witches still used the old Scandinavian naming customs, like Iceland. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then he turned to his other companion, who in fact ranked the others. “Darya Maegorovna.” He didn’t provide a surname, but Narcissa was surprised; though the woman was white-skinned with sharply silvered white hair like her own son’s, but moreso, her eyes were a certain lilac, and moreover, that was a very Russian name, but she was in the uniform of an Indian Air Commodore, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>and the medals suggested she had been in combat, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>and an expression in her eyes that, in common with Colonel Kabanov, suggested she was—whatever role she had now—an experienced killer.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Also there was nothing to identify her as a witch—</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>she wasn’t visibly carrying a wand—</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>but Narcissa felt she was rather distinctly magical nonetheless. There was nothing definite, just a sort of feeling. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Miss Olafsdottir is an expert in ancient siege magic, Your Grace,” Colonel Kabanov explained, “</span></span><span><span>to the college of historians of the Kalmar Ministry.”</span></span><span><span> Muggle that he was, he had adapted professionally and competently to the existence of magic. “Darya Maegorovna represents a special engineering technical group in engineering matters in coordination with the Indian Government.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Andromeda looked sharply at Narcissa, who nodded once and moved to sit. “This is about my inquiry into the enchantment of weapons, is it not?” The Duchess of Lancaster asked. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes Your Grace,” Turid said, and agreeably began to form a magic image, unfolding various artefacts, on the map-table. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Darya sat down and folded her legs, watching with a quiet expression, taking her hat off to rest it in her lap. Behind her, the rain lightly splattered on the window. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Cissy, what are you planning?” Her older sister asked very softly. There just seemed to be a certain air in the room. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Enchanting nuclear weapons,” Narcissa answered, very coolly, very precise. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>We have managed to compute the loss of yield to the enchantments, using the arithmantic equations provided,” Darya observed from where she sat, nearly expressionless. “The engineering simulations confirm that there’s still enough fission energy for a chain reaction even with the enchantments having been made, so, on the technical side, the answer is simple—it’s viable. Turid will have to explain the rest.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>A</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>ndromeda had gone very quiet. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Narcissa glanced at her sister for a moment, and then looked to Turid. “Well, do go on.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Of course, Your Grace. Are you aware of… Siege magic?”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I am. It has not been used in centuries, of course. I don’t believe a single spell has been cast since the Statute of Secrecy was adopted,” </span></span><span><span>Narcissa answered. “I take it you are adapting siege magic. But those are all short-effect spells, not enchantments.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Well, except when it’s used defensively,” Turid smiled, rather deviously. “There is a defensive enchantment for walls which, indeed, would be perfect for the application you propose—the mine-crushing charm.”</span></span></p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Mine. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>Narcissa knew enough about historical warfare to understand the very concept of a ‘mine’ came from a literal mine, an intentionally dug tunnel. The muggle explosives were just a new concept using the old name; originally, a mine was used to </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>literally ‘undermine’ </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>walls. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>It was intended, Your Grace, to react when worked into a wall—to reach out and collapse a mining work coming under the walls. We believe we have a sequence to adapt these spells, however, the adaptations will mean that the sequence will not last for long on the device, before it dissipates. So it still must be worked close to when the weapon is used.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>How much time?” Narcissa asked.</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Four to six hours.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>So it will have to be cast by someone on the launching vessel. Well, that will be arranged. Do you see any disadvantage from the use of defensive magic?”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>No, indeed, it should be safer. Of course there are still risks. You can feel in the bones of this mountain the terrible working that happened to the west.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>The Great Slide,” Narcissa nodded, and Andromeda stiffened. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Yes. That was, siege magic used along very particular ley lines,” Turid nodded. “Of course, it took advantage of a natural vulnerability. We will use nuclear weapons instead.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>It’s a risk we will accept. Thank you.” Narcissa looked down to both women. “You will be available for planning and training?”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Yes,” Darya drawled. “Unfortunately, they’re not letting me fly until this business is done. Too important, or somesuch. I’ll be around, unless I decide to steal an Su-27 for a patrol.”</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Kabanov shot her a look, and the woman got a little bemused grin. Narcissa quickly surmised the Indian Air Commodore enjoyed tweaking the FSB man. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>The temple I maintain is near here,” Turid agreed. “I… Will be praying this is for the best benefit of our people. I am uncomfortable, I admit, merging the muggle poison with our natural magic.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>You’re not the only one,” Andromeda shrugged and rose, staring intently at Darya in particular.</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Both are natural by definition. </span></span><span><span>After all, t</span></span><span><span>hey exist in the world,” the Air Commodore rose, and bowed politely, a masculine gesture but appropriate for her uniform. “Your Grace, M’lady. We will be ready.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Andromeda paced uncomfortably as they left. At the click of the door closing behind them, she unleashed a torrent on her younger sister. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>A flight of military jets, on some patrol or another, flew overhead, first drowning out and then seeming to echo her words.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>...a horrible idea, Narcissa. I didn’t know you intended to do this!” </span></span><span><span>Andromeda exclaimed, </span></span><span><span>her dark eyes a bit wild, her pace frenetic. “Muggle nuclear weapons are bad enough without being blended with magic.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Andy, the prophecy says that there are only two men who may kill the Dark Lord. They both died at the Battle of Hogwarts,” Narcissa didn’t lose her cool with her sister, or stand, as Andromeda twirled about, acting rather Bella-ish, all things said, if with very different portents. Bellatrix wouldn’t give a fig, even though she had once been very concerned about nuclear weapons. “In fact, there’s no way out of this war by killing Voldemort. That means we can only win by taking and holding territory. I must leave </span></span><em><span>nothing </span></em><span><span>to chance. </span></span><span><span>Andy, we </span></span><em><span>don’t know how to win. There’s no magic bullet. </span></em><span><span>This isn’t a war that can be settled by a single duel like Dumbledore’s with Grindelwald. Not now. All we can do is reduce his territory and power until he is a single man, hunted by the whole world. Perhaps he can be captured and locked up. But we must take </span></span><em><span>any </span></em><span><span>measure to win. And Britain is the most intact nation on the planet. If my engineering the defection of Britain succeeds then the Morsmordre will be </span></span><em><span>crippled.</span></em><span><span>”</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Andromeda paused and looked hard at her. “All right, Narcissa,” she said, ever so seriously, full name, grim expression. “And what if it does something unexpected?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Then it will do something unexpected to our enemies. We will be firing long-range cruise missiles from positions in the North Sea off Stavanger,” Narcissa’s voice was taut, and she gripped the armrests of her chair with her hands hard enough to turn them pale. “</span></span><span><span>This is being reviewed at multiple levels by MinAtom, </span></span><span><span>by </span></span><span><span>the Indian Department of Atomic Energy, </span></span><span><span>by MinKol, by the Norwegian and Swedish Ministries as well… This meeting was not the first, it won’t be the last. Andy, if we don’t take out the Channel Tunnel, the invasion will fail. And we need to take out Azkaban to clear the way. Only enchanted missiles will get through to Azkaban. Otherwise, its own defences… Will block the cruise missiles going into the Channel from the north. And conventional nuclear weapons don’t have the power to crack the tunnel, it’s too deep. </span></span><span><span>Bella already agreed with me.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Oh great, </span></span><em><span>Bella </span></em><span><span>agreed..”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>She was very concerned about the environment growing up. She saw that Muggles were destroying it. And she’s right. They were. But a few more bombs, more or less, won’t change what’s already been done. Andy, you’re a Black…”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>It isn’t the nukes! I know our forces have to use them sometimes. </span></span><span><span>But what if it does something to—to </span></span><em><span>magic </span></em><span><span>itself? Has anyone combined magic and radiation before? Magic can’t heal it; that’s known.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I can’t talk about it, Andy, but MinKol had experts.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>What do you mean you can’t talk about it? Cissy, you’re the Head of Government! The Lady Regent! You can damn well declassify it if you want to.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Well then, I’ll just tell that you’re wrong.” Narcissa got up and walked to the windows. “We do have some experience. MinKol attempted something at Chernobyl, after the incident there.”</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The statement brought Andy up short. “Oh.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>
    <span>M</span>
    <span>idnight, 1-2 February, 2004</span>
  </b>
</p><p>
  <b>
    <span>Trondheimsfjord, Norway.</span>
  </b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>T</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>he </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Blackburn </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Buccaneers </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>from the </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Inflexible </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>went low over the Trondheimsfjord. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Night-flying at low altitude over the mountains and black water of the Norwegian coast in rainy conditions was exceptionally dangerous. To these highly trained men, whose bombers had been enchanted to make them almost undetectable, the risk was the terrain and the lack of warning—their altimeter radars would ruin their protection—rather than any enemy fire. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Even the sound from the engines had been muffled by the charms. But magic itself had its own risks, and the Norwegian wizards had already raised detection charms around the entire anchorage. The Bucs blasting them through at 1070km/h ‘on the deck’ at an altitude of </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>2</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>0 metres triggered orange blossoms in the sky, briefly illuminating the green and black roundels on the wings marking them as servants of the Morsmordre. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>A </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Lumos Magnos </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>charm erupted into the sky above them. Tracer rounds from 57mm automatic cannon, both Soviet and Bofors models, began to streak into the sky over the Trondheimsfjord. Several SAM complex systems attempted to lock on, but the charms on the bombers—sacrificing technology for stealth (if they brought up any of their radars, the electronics would be immediately destroyed by the charms)--held. They snaked past the missiles without a single successful intercept. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then the light charms vanished. The men in their flying machines </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>knew it. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>The Wizards and Witches defending the anchorage were being ordered to douse them to try and avoid their strike detecting the fleet! But it was too late. They had already seen the dim black bulk of large ships mustered in the anchorage off Trondheim. They selected their targets with low voltage night vision bomb sights which could operate around the magical charms on the aeroplanes and blasted closer and closer as the anti-aircraft artillery continued to fire wildly, and futilely, into the sky. They commenced their final attack runs, and ‘pickled’ their bombs as they crossed over at high speed. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Each flight, sixteen Bucs in all, attached separately, with each one recording the damage as it passed over. Explosions erupted from damaged ships, what seemed to be pieces of superstructure crumbled and rose with massive flashing detonations into the sky. Several of the ships that were hit seemed to be merchants, but the men could clearly see the missile tubes and grey superstructures of some of the others. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>They reported back that they had sunk or heavily damaged one aircraft carrier, one battlecruiser, and four destroyers. </span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>
      <b>2</b>
    </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>
      <b> February, 2004</b>
    </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <b>
    <span>50</span>
    <span>KM </span>
    <span>W</span>
    <span> of </span>
    <span>Stavanger, Norway. </span>
  </b>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bella and Hermione could distantly see the island of Utsira to the north as the </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Admiral Kornilov </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>turned east for the final approach </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>to the Boknafjord and the safety of the defences established at Stavanger. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>There were still damaged aeroplanes on the deck, being repaired from yesterday’s raid. The naval aviators claimed four frigates, though Bella had just sniffed and remarked that aviators always were wrong about how much damage they did. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>There was both exhaustion and exhilaration in the air. They had </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>done it, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>the Baltic Fleet had broken out of the Skagerrak. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>They had reached port in safety. The whole of two Russian fleets were now in communication along the coast of Norway, ready to act in concert against the homeland of the Morsmordre. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix turned to go back inside. She was visibly tired in the cold, even after sleeping. “Well, we get to explore another city in Norway, right?” Hermione asked, feeling happier, and grinning to cheer her girlfriend up.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes, that. For some reason our relationship seems to have a common theme in Norwegian towns.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>We weren’t in a relationship at the time we visited Norway last, Bella,” Hermione felt her cheeks flush, thankfully hidden from the way they were stung red with the cold lash of the wind. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>You know, it’s hard to actually remember that. It seems like we were </span></span><span><span>together</span></span><span><span> at the time,” Bella replied, before swinging open the hatch and stepping over the steel combing below. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>It was a magical moment. It was the most ineffably </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>normal </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>couple thing that Hermione had ever gotten out of Bellatrix. A statement of simple and self-assured affection. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>There was a bit of a skip in her step as she dogged the hatch behind them, and they made their way to the chart room. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The Admiral was talking with some of his subordinates. “They attacked Trondheimsfjord last night, but they didn’t press the attack. They sank some freighters, disguised as warships. It was very odd; they attacked late, and then turned away to the west. It would have been bad, but in fact the fleet had already turned to the southwest through the Trondheimsleia. They will leave a forward detachment at </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Ålesund, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>and then the main body will return to Trondheim. But, it’s all really quite odd. They could have badly hurt us, if they were better coordinated, and pressed the attack.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione glanced to Bella. The elder witch was smirking brilliantly.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The young witch’s eyes narrowed. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Narcissa’s contact. He must be doing this. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She idly wondered what it was like to be a Slytherin whose plan was coming together. </span>
  </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. Darya Maegorovna is a character of mine from another story. I occasionally use characters from other stories I write, for cameos. </p><p>2. Hedwig Jugson is an original character, but in general, Pureblood families are extremely small, and creating some extra members seems appropriate. </p><p>3. A hatch combing is a raised metal lip to keep sloshing water out when open, on a ship. A hatch is "dogged", which is the act of securing it (i.e., closing it).</p><p>4. The Great Slide is of course the Storegga Slide.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0058"><h2>58. The Springing of the Year – 2004</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><b>The Springing of </b> <b>the Year – </b> <b>2004</b></p><p> </p><p>Blaise Zabini sat with a quiet confidence before his own communication mirror. Hedwig Jugson was not so calm at all. Addressing the two sat Pius Thicknesse, who headed the government in London. He had considerably more power now that the Dark Lord was in Anatolia, but Blaise knew well enough he was really a man enslaved to the Imperious Curse (and, savagely, had been seven years now), and would never present any kind of alternative strategy to what his master told him.</p><p>Blaise was mostly ignoring what Thicknesse was droning on about. It was almost all irrelevant, and what really mattered was impressing upon him what had exactly happened. From the point of view that mattered. He smiled blandly, which continued to perturb Hedwig.</p><p>“So, what transpired?”</p><p>The young Sea Lord moved quickly to intercept that question. “With inadequate support, I attacked the enemy immediately, and was unready to face them because I had inadequate intelligence as well. I was out of place facing one threat before I was informed of the second, though they were only travelling slowly through the pack ice in the Baltic. Nonetheless, we executed a punishing attack on the Trondheimsfjord. The pilots may indeed have overstated the level of damage, but the only ‘failure’, Minister, was that we were caught unawares by the breakout of the Russian Baltic Fleet, and unable to prevent it. That was a failure of the reconnaissance and intelligence apparatus.” Blaise didn’t outright accuse her, but Thicknesse wasn’t stupid enough to need to be reminded of who was in charge of that as the area commander, either, so he didn’t need to.</p><p>“The Russians practised absolute operational security, they had complete radio and emissions silence, they were barely even using the electronics on their ships—not a single wizard aboard the fleet used a single spell. There was <em>nothing </em>for any technological or magical method of detection to <em>find</em>! And that damned icebreaker they have, the one with the nuclear reactor, it let the fleet move at least twice as fast through the ice as we anticipated!”</p><p>
  <em>Perfect. </em>
</p><p>“But the … Ice-breaker has always been there, has it not?”</p><p>Hedwig looked like she had been hit by a sour-mouth hex. “Yes it has, Minister.”</p><p>“Then why did we not consider the risk?”</p><p>“These so-called experienced men of the old muggle militaries were unprepared for it!” She exclaimed. “They had no idea that it was viable for the Baltic Fleet to force the Kattegatt, especially in winter with ice cover.”</p><p>“Mine did evaluate the risk,” Blaise countered directly, now. “Also, we’re not facing <em>muggles, </em>we’re facing MinKol. They have a very high confidence in their ability to protect muggle military assets from conventional, muggle attack. They drew their plans with that confidence. I have the documents.”</p><p>“I will be very interested to see them. You will owl them to the Ministry?”</p><p>“Of course,” Blaise answered.</p><p>“Zabini, if you knew there was a risk, why was your fleet out of position?”</p><p>“Because my <em>instructions </em>from the <em>Area Defence Commander,</em>” he looked sharply at Hedwig and now his voice raised a bit, “were to intercept the Northern Fleet. I was already in the Norwegian Sea by the time you found out about the Baltic Fleet’s breakout attempt, Hedwig. It would be ridiculous and timid for me to cower under the cover of land-based air with the most powerful carrier in Europe when the odds were very favourable for me to inflict serious loss on the Northern Fleet, at sea, where the ships could not be salvaged. However, because I was not supported with proper intelligence, the Baltic Fleet had already broken out by the time I knew of it. To attack them first would require my squadrons to pass over heavy air defences which the Russians have established at Stavanger and Bergen. To immediately attack the Northern Fleet meant I would remain in position for the Baltic Fleet to attack me from behind. So I had to order the fleet to stand out further into the Atlantic and <em>then </em>attack the Northern Fleet from a position where I could retreat, and protect any cripples in the fleet, to a safe harbour—in that case, Scapa Flow.”</p><p>“And in doing so, you left us to lose two frigates from the North Sea Squadron,” Hedwig glared.</p><p>“But I protected the battle-fleet from damage, and I conducted the attack on the enemy I had been instructed to attack. The North Sea Squadron has always been sacrificial. And, they were used in a reasonable attempt to lure the enemy within range of Azkaban. It was a gambit which failed, but as we have all learned in the past six years of war, battles are uncertain. Intelligence is the main item which can change that, and I was operating blind about the intentions and position of the Baltic Fleet.”</p><p>Thicknesse slowly tapped his desk. “I’ve had quite enough of this. Hedwig, you’re being reassigned as the commander of the Sixth Air Force on the Russian front.”</p><p>The woman blanched.</p><p>“You need to be under closer supervision of an integrated operational headquarters. Also, you are quite junior, and the situation in Britain is now somewhat serious. The enemy is clearly concentrating assets to attack our islands. Blaise, good young man, good head on your shoulders. You will take command as the Area Defence Commander. I am certain if you can disrupt the buildup of forces in Norway, whatever the real intention is, the Dark Lord will personally reward you.”</p><p>“Of course, Minister,” Blaise dipped his head politely.</p><p>“That will be all.” The ghostly image faded away.</p><p>Blaise rose, and at last allowed himself a small, triumphant smirk. It faded almost as soon as it had come. The next step in the plan would be exceedingly dangerous, certainly, but the offered rewards were also great. And, he would be an idiot to think that continued service of the Dark Lord was a wise proposition. He had stopped caring about anything at all in the world, and was fixated entirely on some dark mountain in eastern Anatolia. He was throwing his troops into making gains in what had been a secondary theatre, and all of his capacity for war-fighting was concentrated in the untouched British isles.</p><p>There was plenty of weakness in that situation, and a good Slytherin knew when to walk away.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The preparation for a major operation could be exhausting, but it was also far more open than actual operations. They lived in comfortable homes, they did their work in offices and meeting halls, over maps and tables of information. There was reasonably good food, particularly for the officers.</p><p>There was a little time for Bellatrix and Hermione to just be a couple. It was a small vacation cottage in the woods outside of Ålesund to the east, but with magic to make everything comfortable, it was everything they needed.</p><p>A couple with a child. It was the first time they were all together, for more than a few weeks at a time. She was growing up, now, at an age where Hermione was introducing her to as many books as possible, though she wanted friends and that was harder to arrange in the circumstances, with the security detail. Still, she was the darling of the officers; she always had flowers in her hair and a neat braid, and veteran Generals and Admirals, when an opportunity allowed at the headquarters in Ålesund, would let her sit in their laps.</p><p>That gave Hermione and Bella some private moments, and there was a sauna in the woods behind the cottage. Today, though, she had Delphini curled up on the couch, looking at copies of <em> Planets </em> and <em> Man and Space </em>from the Life Science Library. Both were translations into Norwegian she had found—at Delphini’s age, with a young and supple mind, they were making good progress on teaching her a fourth language (only magical books were available in Cumbric, and Hermione was still learning that tongue, herself). The two books were respectively by Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, and Hermione had read library copies as a girl, herself. Her mother was off at some meeting or another, where Hermione’s attendance was not required.</p><p>“The muggles took pictures of the planets. From up close.” Delphi’s face twisted up with a frown of thought. “But we can’t do that. Muggles did something that we can’t do.”</p><p>“Not true,” Hermione laughed gently. “Delphi, of <em>course </em>you can take pictures of the planets from up close. You could travel to the stars just like any other human being. You’d just do it like any other human, whether or not they have magic.”</p><p>Delphi shot her a look, a thinking girl, maybe a little embarrassed at the implication. “...Could I even use magic on Mars? If I couldn’t, I’d just be a muggle there.”</p><p>“You’ll never just be a muggle, because Earth will always be here. But it might require accepting that, for a time, you’re no different than one, yes. It’s said that magic is linked to the natural forces of life. I’ve sometimes wondered if aliens also have magic like we do…”</p><p>“<em>Aliens</em>? Now you’re talking funny, Hermione.” Bellatrix would always be <em>Mum </em>for Delphi. She had yet to decide that Hermione deserved that appellation as well. And Hermione respected that. But about a week ago, while sleepy, Delphi had slipped up from her serious effort, and called Hermione ‘mum’ as she yawned and settled down to sleep. It was that moment which made Hermione feel like she could spend ten thousand nights like this, sitting with the girl, and trying to negotiate the delicate circumstances of her past. Delphi might be a halfblood—the same caste as a daughter that Hermione herself could have with a pureblood—but she had been raised to see herself as a Pureblood, because nobody dared treat the Dark Lord as anything but. Bellatrix had been raising her with a Pureblood’s disdain for muggle-borns. Hermione was trying to undo the privilege that her own lover had inoculated into her daughter, before that fateful turn.</p><p>And Hermione had already gotten “mama” out of her. She still thrilled at that moment. But no giddy feeling was going to get her out of answering the precocious girl’s question.</p><p>“Hermione?” Delphi looked up in query. “Aliens?”</p><p>“Well, people from other planets. Maybe they’ll look like Elves, or, well, anything, like someone far different from elves. Anyway, before I knew I was magical, I wanted to see aliens someday. But instead, I got to meet House Elves. Still, now, I wonder if there are aliens—I do think there are—and I wonder what they will look like. If they’ll have magic.”</p><p>“Mum does say you like House Elves a lot,” Delphi nodded. “So I guess it makes sense that you like these aliens so much.”</p><p>Hermione leaned back into the couch cushions and nodded. “I guess I’ve always been like that.”</p><p>“Well, maybe if there’s life on Mars, I could still be a witch there,” Delphi returned to her original thought as she looked back down at the pictures in the book. “It doesn’t have to be human life, right?”</p><p>“Oh, it’s the whole web of life that we think supports and sustains magic. We don’t <em>think </em>there’s life on Mars, but there <em>might </em>be. It would be in the soil, though. Though the author of that other book,” she referred to Clarke, “once wrote a novel where there was life on oceans under the ice on Europa, the moon of Jupiter. Now <em>there </em>we might see a <em>lot </em>of life.”</p><p>“Then I want to be the first witch to go to Europa! If it’s an ocean, perhaps I’ll find merpeople there.”</p><p><em> I f there’s any part of the world left that can go into space. If wizards and muggles can sit side by side and plan such a thing, </em>Hermione mused, a little sadly. “Well, with your imagination, you can go anywhere, Delphi. So you’ll get a chance to dream of Europa in your sleep now, because it’s bedtime.”</p><p>It was the usual little war of words for bedtime. It always would be. After tucking Delphi in, and waving her wand to blank the magical lights, she went to the kitchen and got herself a glass of kreking, traditional Norwegian wine made with blackberries, with spices and herbs added. A part of her mused about Carl Sagan, and she was glad he had died before this war. It would have been the ruination of all his hopes for humanity. Instead of a world of peace and exploration and science, they were in a world of war and superstition. The ineffable sense of wonder which had driven Hermione to love magic from the moment she had discovered it, had been replaced by something more like Lovecraft. Monsters lurked in the bottom of mountains in hills.</p><p>And it all had to be done.</p><p>Hermione finished draining the glass. The door opened; it was warded, so that could only mean one person. “Bella. Delphi’s already asleep, of course.”</p><p>“Of course,” Bellatrix sighed. “So much for today’s Cumbric lesson.” Bella eyed the open bottle of kreking on the counter. “Game for another glass, Hermione?”</p><p>“With you? Always.” She poured them out. “Anything I should know? You do seem a little tense.”</p><p>“There’s been a complication. Thicknesse and Voldemort prevailed upon the Americans to finally send help. An American carrier group has been dispatched to Reykjavik, and another one to Lough Swilly.”</p><p>Hermione bit at her lip. That <em>was </em>bad. The American carriers were still the best in the world. “They don’t even have that many left, do they?”</p><p>“Just six,” Bella agreed.</p><p>“Of course, the MACUSA has never provided serious support to Voldemort before.”</p><p>“It seems he’s worried enough about our buildup that he finally told them to put up or shut up,” Bella replied, and there was a glint of savage bemusement in her eyes as she knocked back the glass. “Cissy tells me that if we strike boldly and show we have the ability to win, that they’ll be unreliable.”</p><p>“That’s what this is, isn’t it?”</p><p>“It is.” Bellatrix agreed. Then she leaned back against the counter, and eyed Hermione archly. “You’re a nice sight to come home to.”</p><p>Hermione smirked even as she felt her blood rush. She was a grown woman, and an experienced veteran, but… Well, she <em>knew </em>Bella now, in every sense, but the older witch could still easily get her worked up. “Is it the wine or the sense of danger that’s turned you on?”</p><p>“Maybe just being around all the old men and having to think about you to keep from getting bored,” Bella answered saucily, and leaned in for a kiss.</p><p>Hermione was carried away. She could just imagine Bella—impertinent, insouciant, uncaring Bella—idly glancing at the briefings, already with a fully formed picture of what she intended to do in her head. Nodding along and making the right noises, so the staff officers felt their briefings mattered, when really Bella was the sort of commander who operated on a divine intuition for the terrible symphony of War. Bella, who was wasting her brain-power on more important things. Like fantasizing about <em>her. </em>About one muggle-born Hermione Granger.</p><p>She realised that Bella’s hand had just been shoved down her uniform pants. It wasn’t like she needed anything else to be horny, after all, fantasizing about Bella boredly fantasizing about her had been more than adequate!</p><p>Bellatrix pushed her closer in to the counter, pinned her in place even though she was the smaller woman. Her hand pushed firmly through Hermione’s panties, and gently rubbed. A moan could not help but escape from the younger woman. Her hips responded to Bella’s fingers, fabric in the way or no.</p><p>Bella reached her gloved hand up to Hermione’s neck. “Come, kiss me,” she instructed, gently tugging her head down. Their lips met, even as Hermione fixated on the first word for a moment. There was that fussy, rules-obeying, teacher’s pet part of her that wanted to object. “What if Delphi wakes up?”</p><p>“What if she <em>doesn’t</em>,” Bella counted with a grin, and kissed Hermione more fervently, this time with her tongue.</p><p>Hermione’s back curved and her lips pushed down into Bella’s. She couldn’t get enough of that feeling… But then Bellatrix redoubled it, and her fingers slipped down under Hermione’s panties.</p><p>Hermione was being shoved up against a kitchen counter by a shorter, smaller woman, who was intent on pleasuring her with her fingers right there and then, without bothering to remove a shred of clothing. A lustful, insistent, and possessive Bellatrix, who could wait for nothing at all in the world. Just want she wanted.</p><p>Their kisses grew more fervent. Bella’s fingers were more insistent. Hermione, with her hips shoved forward and her legs back against the counter—it was uncomfortable but she didn’t care, it was urgent, needed, desired, the sex was worth a little bit of an ache in her thighs she could easily forget about…</p><p>Bella’s fingers worked until she was wet, and then took advantage of the slickness to slip up, and stroke more sensitive flesh. Hermione felt the rising tension and need within herself. She wanted it, and she wanted it badly.</p><p>Bellatrix was so damned skilled with what she did. She had Hermione’s body plotted and marked! She learned fast, in the way of someone who was too smart to need much formal education, and too bored to stay with it; she devoted her fingers to controlling Hermione’s body like a DJ—manipulating every part of her lover as part of the experience.</p><p>Taut and tense and desperate and wildly pleasured for the intensity of what Bella did for her—Hermione came. Her back arched, her body pressed down into Bella’s, the older woman muffled her moans quite effectively in kisses behind plump red lips. As the jerks of her hips settled, Bella gently pulled her to the side, resting on the cabinet to support her. Breathing hard, the younger witch was supported by her as she calmed—just a little.</p><p>Bella always made love by fucking her first. Kitchens, tanks, beds; it didn’t matter. That strange considerateness, unexpected from the first, from when Bella still called her muddy—it had drawn her in. Bellatrix seemed more interested in seeing her pleasured than in experiencing her own. However controlling she was, however, sometimes, casually bigoted she still could be, Bella put the needs of others first.</p><p>Hermione let herself be coaxed along back to their bedroom, snuggled up and around Bellatrix. Their clothes fell off in disorderly piles until only an engageante and a glove on Bella’s left hand marked them, two nude women, in tones of brown and white, mingled together in bed. It was still winter, even if the hope of spring loomed like a promise, and the snow was piled high outside, but the woodstove in the cottage kept them warm. The quilts were pushed aside and forgotten.</p><p>Bella tossed herself back into the pillows like a Queen on her throne. Legs spread out, her hair draping behind her in a resplendent curtain, she was somewhere between woman, witch, and an object of worship; Hermione felt a greedy lust at the chance to reciprocate, as she buried herself between Bella’s legs. Somewhere along the way, the leather covering that left hand had ceased to be problematic, it was just part of who Bellatrix was now, and when it pressed down into the tangled, frizzy curls of Hermione’s hair, she submitted to the direction, and with tongue and lips, gave back to her love as months of experience allowed her to do.</p><p>Bella’s hips quickened beneath her as Hermione’s tongue shifted up to explore her more thoroughly, to pressure and to pleasure. The way her face was scrunched up with un-expressed need, that she held in her own moans as they made love, for the sake of not waking Delphi; it was attractive in its own right. Long ago, she had abandoned the idea of Bella being an enemy. Older still was the idea of hating her. Somewhere along the way, the movement of her hips, the way she muffled her own moans—these had become a joy to Hermione’s heart.</p><p>She would do anything for Bella, but most of all that night, she made love to her.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>It was as the spring had just begun to melt the snow, while it still was piled high, but mostly packed firmly, the lowest layers almost like ice. The fine house in the traditional style was a fitting enough place for a witch like . It fronted on an ancient hörgr, or open-air altar of the Norse faith. Turid had welcomed them with Mead, and after a brief prayer and offering, led them inside.</p><p>Inside, Hermione saw the woman in the Indian Air Force uniform that Narcissa had mentioned before. Like Narcissa, she had the ineffable sense the woman was somewhat magical, even though she had no wand. But, she came to attention and politely saluted Bellatrix. “General.”</p><p>“Air Commodore,” Bellatrix acknowledged, her mind as sharp as a whippet, she never forgot military ranks even though she affected not to care about them at all. Hermione could tell there was respect in her eyes, and this was rarely granted to a muggle, so she must have seen it as well.</p><p>Darya returned to her seat, picking up her own glass of mead. “We’ve confirmed everything, General. It’s ready. MinAtom confirmed the review of the plans, and you have my word of honour.”</p><p>Bellatrix sank down into her own chair, and stared almost incomprehendingly at her glass of mead for a moment, as Hermione sat last, feeling unnaturally dense, remember back to the awful night of fire, on the day the modern world had died. The raven-haired witch jerked, and raised her glass, her eyes gleaming in a way that, to Hermione, seemed rather peculiar. “Go on, Air Commodore.”</p><p>“We’ve received a shipment of eight Russian 200kT thermonuclear warheads. As the uneducated would say—each one is about twelve times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Of course, it’s more complicated than that. At any rate, they’re being loaded aboard the <em>Admiral Ushakov. </em>There will be no impacts to the operational serviceability of the missiles; we tested the inertial guidance systems under enchantment successfully, using the enchanted electrical components, and I understand you can duplicate those.”</p><p>“<em>I can,</em>” Bella admitted with some obvious pride.</p><p>Now it was Turid who spoke.<em> “ </em>I understand that the Duchess Narcissa will have the two of you personally handling the operation. Four for Azkaban. Then four for the Channel Tunnel.”</p><p><em>Now I understand!</em> Hermione’s eyes widened for a moment. The final piece of the puzzle was in place. She had heard Narcissa’s arguments and appreciated why they had to this. It was critical for winning in the operation, to keep the Morsmordre from throwing in reinforcements from the continent. She got it.</p><p>Now she understood what was personal about it to Bellatrix. To clear the way for attacking the Chunnel with diving nuclear warheads, they were not going to simply assault the fortress of Azkaban. They were going to utterly annihilate it. It was an expatiation for Bellatrix. A chance to move beyond all that had been done to her, and all that she had done.</p><p>A cleansing in fire.</p><p>With a slightly manic air, Bellatrix accepted the plans she was given, the scrolls of parchment which recorded the incantations, in the moving picture-images that wizards used to teach each other how to cast spells. Turid presented them with a flourish. In Bella’s hands, to her point of view, was the opportunity to finally bury the past—when this operation was done, Azkaban would simply cease to exist.</p><p>Hermione raised her glass, and wondered. <em>So far, we haven’t had much success at burying the past. It tends to refuse to stay dead. </em>Yet she understood why Bella needed the closure so badly, even if she would never admit it, not in a hundred years, not in a thousand.</p><p>And it was militarily necessary, of that, Hermione had every confidence. They could not land on the eastern coast of Scotland without removing Azkaban from the equation, and she had, in fact, been wondering for a while how it would be done, as that part of the operation seemed much less important than the others. Now she knew. It was less important because the suppression of the wizarding fortress would be done by a new weapon never before seen in the world.</p><p>And these two women assigned to develop it were very confident that it would work.</p><p>But it hadn’t been tested, and it couldn’t be tested. The moment an enchanted nuclear device was used somewhere on the planet, the sheer scale of the energies involved would immediately alert Voldemort that it had been done, and so counters could be developed before it was actually used.</p><p>They had to trust Turid and Darya, that they and their teams, the magical and engineering teams involved in this effort, had known what they were doing, and had integrated Bella’s developments in systematic electrical magic competently. Hermione, though, knew that her lover shared no such hesitation. She understood, too, that Narcissa was perfectly comfortable with the effort, and she wondered what quiet agony the woman had endured, knowing that her older sister would spend her life in Azkaban.</p><p>A quiet agony that Narcissa had helped forge stronger bonds from. Love for family. The love that drove her to fight and sacrifice—the love which made her overcome even her own bigotry, to the point that she now counted Hermione as part of the family.</p><p>It was clear that both sisters, for their own reasons and their own experiences, intended to see Azkaban annihilated.</p><p>Hermione raised her glass. <em>And there’s nothing wrong with that. </em></p><p>As the Odyssey said of cunning Ulysses on the eve of his battle with the suitors, it was time for them to reclaim their halls. That they would go through the ruin of Azkaban--so much the better.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. The Admiral Ushakov -- The lead ship of Project 1144 "Orlan", the Kirov-class battlecruisers.</p><p>2. I have seen, and admittedly, have used, both the spellings Kattegatt and Kattegat to refer to the northeastern part of the Baltic Straits around Jutland (the approach from the North Sea into the Baltic Sea). </p><p>3. 200kT -- The standard form of the abbreviation for "kiloton"; the Hiroshima bomb was under 20, but these days, 200kT is a very common "yield", or power, for a nuclear weapon.</p><p>4. MACUSA is ruled by a government nominally aligned to Voldemort, but which has refused to actually assist him in any substantial military fashion. This has some antecedents in Franco's actions in the Second World War.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0059"><h2>59. The Great Operation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Great Operation</b>
</p><p> </p><p>The <em> Admiral Ushakov, </em> laying off Sula Island, was a grand and imposing sight. With two Project 1155 destroyers, a single Project 956, two Project 11353 frigates, and the Norwegian Frigate <em> Narvik, </em> the last survivor of the <em> Oslo </em>class, which had escaped to Murmansk at the start of the war, she formed the “Surface Action Squadron” of the Northern Fleet. Her two sisters were each tasked to guard one of the Northern Fleet’s two carriers, so that the fleet was divided into three Task Forces; the Baltic Fleet operating from Stavanger had a single Carrier Task Force, and a single surface-action Task Force with only destroyers and frigates. In the Northern Fleet, the two Carrier groups were positioned further north, at the Trondheimsfjord, but the Surface Action Squadron had been moved south to be in position to screen the attack the Shetland Islands.</p><p>And, ultimately, to conduct the signature attack of the operation.</p><p>Which was why Bellatrix and Hermione were arriving by helicopter aboard the <em> Admiral Ushakov. </em> Bellatrix <em> had </em>been upset, there was no question about it. She wanted to have a hand in commanding the operation. However, the Russians had not wanted her to do so, and it was a reasonable consideration. While the planned invasion included two divisions of “British” troops which were under ‘General Black’s’ command, one of actual re-formed units of the British Army, and one of Bellatrix’s Black Guards, it also included a VDV paratrooper division, a VDV air assault division, a Naval Infantry Division, two divisions of the regular Russian Army, two entire fleets of the Russian Navy, two bomber regiments, four fighter regiments, two ground attack regiments, and substantial elements of the Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Danish militaries.</p><p>And supreme political authority over the operation was vested in the hands of her sister, anyway, with her headquarters set up in Ålesund.</p><p>It wasn’t like she was supernumerary to the operation.</p><p>They were, after all, ‘only’ going to be tasked with the destruction of the Channel Tunnel… And the Fortress of Azkaban.</p><p>The weather was brisk, the passenger compartment of the helicopter unheated, when they clambered down onto the helicopter pad aft on the massive battlecruiser. The anchorage around them was now filled with commandeered Ro-Ro ferries, being filled with troops and military equipment. Anti-Aircraft batteries with their radar masts up sat atop the hills on the islands all around. The high fields were blossoming with flowers, and the snow melting from the tops of the hills. The sun of spring was bright in the morning air.</p><p>With a scream of rotors, the helicopter clawed skyward as soon as the two witches had walked clear of the rotor backwash on the deck.</p><p>Darya was waiting for them, and the Air Commodore snapped off a quick salute to Bellatrix. “This way, General.”</p><p>“You will not be along with us, I assume?”</p><p>“That’s so. They’ll give me a fighter in the second line, and I’ll take it,” Darya answered. “You’re the spellcasters. Getting them loaded aboard and accessible was the last act.” They made their way briskly up the deck. “Captain Klimov will see you as soon as I am done; I will disembark as soon as soon as we are, because the squadron is already getting ready to quit harbour and put to sea.”</p><p>Both the witches looked at each other. Both felt a little uneasy around the nuke woman. But so far, she had delivered.</p><p>Going forward they finally reached the massive assembly of missile silos in the forward deck, where the huge missiles NATO called the SS-N-19 and the Russians the P-700 Granit sat. A special scaffolding was arrayed around eight of the missile tubes. It glimmered in a metallic off-white.</p><p>“Titanium aeroplane tubing, so it won’t melt if the conventionally armed missiles around them need to be fired first,” Darya noted, and clipped a rope at her belt to a carabiner on one of the scaffolds. “This way,” she said, and dropped down.</p><p>“I don’t need a fucking ring of metal to do that,” Bella muttered, and followed the Indian Air Commodore down to the platform carefully built around the warhead bay of the missile. It was ridiculously narrow. The tube was not exactly designed for people to work on the missile while it was loaded.</p><p>Hermione looked down and grimaced, and then followed her girlfriend. She found herself shoved up against Bella with their breasts touching through their uniforms.</p><p>“A little less show, please!” Darya laughed as she popped a panel in front of the nuke and tapped it with a pair of electric pliers. “Here’s your access to the core inside of the ‘gadget’,” she explained, using a common euphemism. “This is your access to the physics package on the bomb. The crews have been trained to remove the scaffolding within minutes as you’re done with each device. You should—we measured and we practised with fake wands—have plenty of room for you to make all the necessary wand motions to complete the enchantment.”</p><p>Hermione’s attempt to reposition herself just shoved her hips into Bella’s. <em>Gahh. </em>“Alright, got it,” Hermione said hastily, showing off a flush in front of a relative stranger. “We’ve trained and practised together on all the enchantments. It will just be a matter of getting down into each tube and doing them in turn?”</p><p>“Yes, that’s it.” Darya sniffed lightly at the two. “Well, if that’s all…”</p><p>“Yes, yes, quite enough!” Bellatrix exclaimed. “We’ll show you off.” Bella immediately apparated with Hermione back to the deck, leaving the Indian-not-Indian woman to haul herself to the deck—which she did in seconds flat in an impressive display of strength.</p><p>“...Are you checking her out, Bella?”</p><p>“Shh!”</p><p>Darya stared at both of them as she got to the top, and then shrugged and saluted. “Good luck, General.” There was a casual grin as her salute was acknowledged. The two went to the edge to watch her go, descending into a small launch via the boarding off the side, and then casting off. Further forward, the anchors were already coming up, having held fast amidst the rock of the bottom of the Fjord, the cascade of water and the rattling of metal promising the operation to come.</p><p>“...Was she grinning at us?”</p><p>“I think she’s as gay as we are,” Bella hrmphed. “I could see it in her eyes. Impertinent muggle.”</p><p>“You actually just used the word <em>gay </em>to describe yourself? I never thought you would! Also, I’m not sure she’s a muggle.” Hermione felt a bit of her girlfriend's mania was contagious in the moment, as they faced what they faced on the ship.</p><p>“<em>Whatever, </em>Granger. We were packed in there like sardines. Eight missiles. It’s going to take time. And of course she’s a muggle, she doesn’t have a wand!” The elder witch tossed her hair back, and turned to find a way up to the bridge. Hermione had to make haste to keep up, even with her longer legs.</p><p>“Still, pretty fit.”</p><p>“Granger, you’re MY girlfriend.”</p><p>“You were checking her out,” Hermione answered, deadpan, just for Bellatrix to whip around and hit her with a mild stinging hex.</p><p><em>Oh fuck you, </em>Hermione’s temper flared, but also a wicked sense of humour as she rubbed her face. There was nobody around as they ducked up through an internal passageway, and she reached out and… Pinched Bella’s butt.</p><p>“GRANGER!”</p><p>“Stinging hex! It’s fair!”</p><p>The two paused at the top of the ladder, and both started laughing—and gave each other a quick hug. How much of it was the stress? Hermione didn’t know, and she didn’t care. She was alive, and all in the moment.</p><p>The crew of the <em>Admiral Ushakov </em>didn’t know why the two Army witches were laughing as they came to the bridge, and grinning, but it was good for morale. Captain Klimov offered a salute, proud of his Northern Fleet battlecruiser. “General Black, Colonel Granger.”</p><p>“Captain Klimov,” Bellatrix acknowledged for the both of them. Hermione fell in beside her, and noted they had just gotten underway, engines at ‘Ahead Slow’. Klimov was a trim man, with hair that had once been sandy brown but now the last vestiges were being lost to grey. She had briefly read his file the night before and it had shown he had been something of a rabble rouser and discipline problem before proving himself on polar operations; a thirty-plus year veteran of the service, he had certainly earned his place as Captain First Rank in command of the <em>Ushakov. </em></p><p>“Welcome aboard the <em>Admiral Ushakov. </em>I understand you’ve already inspected the arrangements for the warheads?”</p><p>“Yes, we have, and they’ll be satisfactory!” Bellatrix exclaimed, rather than go into details. “And I, for my part, see that we’re underway.”</p><p>“The Great Operation begins,” he chuckled and agreed, before adding, “The Indian Air Commodore, she departed?”</p><p>“Oh yes, she did.”</p><p>“Strange woman…” Shaking his head he turned to look ahead on the bridge of the massive nuclear battlecruiser. This was said, apparently without any irony at all, to a woman who had once been Voldemort’s Lieutenant. They were pulling out of the channel toward the sea. “Admiral Leonov will be with you shortly. He’s making some final arrangements with Stavka. Quarters have been arranged near his. You’re welcome to the tea and to review anything you like in the chart room. We’ll be proceeding to the southwest as planned to support the first phase of the operation at the Shetlands, and then turning south for our speed run into the North Sea. The entire crew understands that your presence and this mission is of the utmost importance for our success.”</p><p>Under their feet, the <em>Ushakov </em>very gently shuddered. They were passing out of the protected waters off Sula, and into the open sea, where the swell worked on even a ship the size of the battlecruiser. Bellatrix laughed at Captain Klimov’s words. “Thank you, Captain. Let me assure you and your crew that I have a great personal interest in doing everything within my ability to insure the success of this mission, in fact, I doubt you can imagine how much.”</p><p>But Hermione knew exactly what she meant.</p><p>Azkaban.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Blaise Zabini stepped up onto the bridge of the <em> Inflexible. </em> The main fleet was now laying at Scapa Flow, where it could get underway quickly but still had operational flexibility of where it would go. Two former American nuclear cruisers of the <em> California </em> -class, which had survived the nuclear exchange intact from their decommissioning anchorage, had been supplied to reinforce their escort, and the first of the new carriers of the <em> Relentless </em> class had joined the fleet, but Blaise had elected to retain command from the <em> Inflexible. Relentless </em>had not yet fully worked up and he preferred a veteran ship… Even though both had crews he had selected.</p><p>After all, he could not afford mistakes in the next few days. <em> Everything </em>hinged on making the timing right. If they didn’t successfully execute this operation, while it would be a very great blow to the reputation of his friends, it would be his life, and likely his mother’s and everyone he had slept with for the past five years as well—certainly, there would be other consequences, but Blaise was not so worried about those. He wouldn’t be around to regret them.</p><p>No, it was very much win or die. Around him, then, the expanded fleet was finalising its preparations to put to sea. This was officially on the basis of HUMINT that the enemy were about to begin their operation. From a very strict and limited point of view, that was even true.</p><p>Of course, there was still a debate about whether or not the operation was a flanking manoeuvre against Jutland in support of a major offensive by the Russian Army into Poland, or if it was directed against Britain (a few fantasists insisted it would be an operation against Iceland to allow the Russian forces to strike against the commerce between Britain and American, but it was an enormous concentration of forces for such a secondary theatre). That debate would end soon enough.</p><p>Blaise, of course, already knew what was going to happen. “Captain Palliser, could you come with me, please?”</p><p>“Of course, M’lord.” The veteran turned back, his uniform crisp. He had another officer of the watch preparing to take the <em>Inflexible </em>out, so it was no matter. The two men walked back together to the chart-room.</p><p>Blaise closed the door, and stepped over to the chart. Then he turned, and decided to be kind, within reason. He faced Arthur Palliser sharply. “I am going to give you the opportunity, Captain, to go along with this while <em> not </em>under the Imperious Curse. I did select you carefully for this role, and also make sure we didn’t have an Admiral aboard, for a reason. You, of course, know that being under the Imperious Curse would not help you if we fail.”</p><p>Palliser was perfectly silent. He admitted nothing, he said nothing. He stood and looked at Blaise, and tried to find a level at which they were man to man, instead of muggle to wizard. It was all he could do to keep his dignity together.</p><p>Blaise was in total control of the meeting. One wizard, one muggle, there was no contest. On the field of battle, a hundred, two hundred muggles, trained and ready; that was a threat. Inside of a room, a muggle was simply someone a Wizard could control at Will. But Blaise knew too that having a thinking man, a capable officer, would be much better at his side for the days to come, than the passive, detached figure of someone under the control of the Imperious Curse. After all, they all made jokes about Pius Thicknesse, who had been under the Imperious Curse for what was running on close to a decade. In fact, his pliant passivity was an important part of this plan.</p><p>“You’ve told me I’m a dead man,” Palliser finally said. “And given me a chance to die with dignity, or not. Well, I’ll take that, thank you. What are you planning?”</p><p>“I am going to bring the fleet over to the Duchess of Lancaster’s service.”</p><p>Palliser was silent for a moment, and then smiled and quoted a line of verse. “No gospel can guide it, No law can decide it, In Church or State, till the sword Has sanctified it.”</p><p>Blaise snorted, and grinned in bemusement. “I did not think you a man of poetry, Captain. But you are right. By the sword the Dark Lord built his power, and by the sword, it will fall.”</p><p>“The Wizards in the fleet?”</p><p>“We have lists of those who are with us. As for the others? We will come within range of the enemy to apparate aboard, and take them out. That’s why, even though they are not a strategic target and are well defended, the enemy will assault the Shetland Islands first. It will both prevent wizards in the Army in Scotland from repaying us the favour, by putting us out of the range of apparation of all but the most powerful wizards, and it will give the Russians a base for their own MinKol personnel to apparate aboard our ships.”</p><p>“So we will be going north then, Sir, like we were to seek close action with the Russian Northern Fleet?”</p><p>“Yes, that’s it.”</p><p>“How will it be justified, when it will let the Baltic Fleet elements and the forward squadron the recon birds have seen at Ålesund operate unimpeded in the North Sea?”</p><p>“Most of the transport assets are in the Trondheimsfjord. They will not leave harbour, which gives them an opportunity to be destroyed by us… Which will disrupt the main invasion of Britain, I will explain. The forward operating forces may win some victories, but without troops to land, it is meaningless, as the Fortress of Azkaban commands the North Sea beyond the Firth of Forth.”</p><p>“How will they deal with Azkaban?” Palliser looked neutrally at the map, squinting for a moment.</p><p>“They have a plan. The Duchess of Lancaster did not share it with me, and I accept that and think it sensible.”</p><p>“All right, M’lord. One part of this doesn’t make sense to me. If the enemy’s amphibious assets aren’t going to leave the Trondheimsfjord until we are in position in the Norwegian Sea, how are they going to invade the Shetland Islands?”</p><p>“A special VDV Air Assault division will hit them using helicopters.”</p><p>Palliser measured the distance, ticking it off the map, with a good old map calliper that had been in his family for quite some time. “That’s two hundred and twenty miles. The range of the Mi-24 is two hundred and forty miles with a full load. Mi-8, three hundred and eight miles. Etcetera.”</p><p>“I don’t worry myself with the risks the Russians have chosen to take, Captain.”</p><p>Palliser looked sharply at him for a moment, and then shrugged. “Brave men, M’lord,” he remarked. “It will be an unrefuelled operation, you see, M’lord. They will conquer, or die. So one more thing.”</p><p>“Go on.”</p><p>“The Americans.”</p><p>“At a certain point in this operation, we will receive a signal, before we have formally defected. That signal will tell me whether or not we should launch a direct attack on the two American carrier groups, and hit them hard, and fast, and first, or if other arrangements have been made.”</p><p>“We’ve got thirty-two fixed wing aeroplanes on the <em>Inflexible, </em>M’lord. Forty on the <em>Relentless. </em>The main strike group on each of the American carriers will be more than fifty, and they have the E-2s, the tankers, the S-3s for ASW coverage—I assume the Russians have submarines out for this—anyway, I’m not saying it can’t be done, M’lord. But. We’ll get one chance at this. We’ll have to use everything except the Harriers on the Invincibles, and if the Americans hit us with a strike back, they will provide limited air defence for it, at best. It won’t be pretty.”</p><p>Blaise turned toward the door, laughing. “Then don’t fuck it up, Captain.”</p><p>But for all the uncaring style of his commander, Palliser was smiling. “It will be a pleasure, M’lord.”</p><p>As Blaise reached the door, Palliser spoke again. “One personal request, M’lord. Since we can’t ship the proper flags, will you transfigure the Morsmordre when we turn our coats?”</p><p>“Yes Captain, you’ll have your White Ensigns.” With that, he stepped out.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Narcissa Malfoy stood with Draco at the staff headquarters in Ålesund, watching the teams work. The men and women of the staff were busy with their effort. The MinKol headquarters were in the next building over, with radiological isolation gear between the two to provide electronics shielding—allowing the magical and electrical communications to be separated by only the quick movement of a runner, and a bridge of low-voltage telephone wiring.</p><p>She was always as cold as ice, but right now, Narcissa was such a frozen statue that even Draco was uncomfortable around her, and had taken the opportunity to step away to talk with Larissa Sergeivna, who was also at headquarters and would be accompanying Narcissa when she boarded the amphibious forces flagship the next day. Sometimes, Narcissa looked out the windows to the hills, at the air defence emplacements, the troops outside in the street, and shook her head, and looked back to the status boards which were showing the position of naval and air assets. The operation had begun.</p><p>Andromeda stepped up to her side, and showed no fear at the ice in her younger sister’s heart. “I’m sure she’ll be fine, Cissy. The details of their part of the plan were reviewed again, and again, at every level of multiple ministries.”</p><p>“Something could still go wrong. Something could still be unexpected. Nobody has ever attempted this before. And even when you neglect <em>that </em>part, this operation is at the strategic limit of our forces,” Narcissa murmured, turning away, and pulling Andy with her, that they couldn’t be overhead by others who might be demoralised by the frank conversation. That left Larissa and Draco to wander off by themselves, talking.</p><p>“I grant the point,” Andy acknowledged. “Still, Bella and Hermione are fine witches, on one of the finest warships afloat, at least of what I understand of such things. And they drilled this plan extensively.”</p><p>“It’s not that part. It’s the part,” Cissy hissed, “Where we can’t test it beforehand.”</p><p>“...Wasn’t that my complaint a month ago?” Andy blinked.</p><p>Cissy sighed and rolled her eyes. “Yes it was.”</p><p>“And you calmed me down," Andromeda continued, matter-of-factly.</p><p>“Yes, I did.” Cissy had this suspicion that her elder sister had her in a corner.</p><p>“So… What changed?” She did.</p><p>“It’s happening tomorrow,” Cissy admitted with a shrug. She hated admitting weakness, even to Bella, because Bella had gone mad, and was unpredictable, and a threat to her son, and… Admitting weakness to her middle sister, that had been unthinkable, as unthinkable as <em>talking to her </em>for <em>decades. </em>Now they were putting their relationships back together.</p><p>But Narcissa had the grace and dignity to admit she still had a problem with this. So she hesitantly reached out, and was rewarded with a hug from Andy.</p><p>“It is happening tomorrow, and that is scary. But you won’t be far behind, on the <em>Mitrofan Moskalenko.</em> You’re quite capable of apparating far enough to help Bella personally if you need to.”</p><p>“I am the <em>leader,</em>” Cissy frowned. “It’s risky enough that I’m going to be travelling personally with the second wave. And you’re needed here with the children.”</p><p>“Draco will be with you, won’t he?”</p><p>“Yes, but..” Narcissa closed her eyes. “Draco, I brought him back to my side to be <em>safe.</em>”</p><p>“If he had the chance to help his Aunt Bella, would he refuse? I don’t know what he was like growing up, Cissy. I will be honest. You didn’t give me that chance. But that’s also a blessing in disguise. You worry so much, but I see the man standing there, who is respected by his fellow MinKol officers, who bears a medal you don’t earn for staff work. And he gained it twice. Your son, Cissy, is a man among men. And he chafes at being away from the feats that Bella and Hermione do. Not because he isn’t afraid or because he lusts for blood, because he is afraid, and he’ll never lust for blood. But because he knows he’s capable, and he’s learned how to swallow his fear, and do what must be done. He won’t take chances, and he will do what is right. Take him with you, and if the situation demands it, let him go—I know he can apparate that far as well. Don’t stifle him.”</p><p>Cissy sighed, shivering at her older sister’s words. She didn’t want to admit it, but they rang true. “Alright, Andy… Alright. I will.”</p><p>A distant rumble grew around them, abruptly, echoing off the hills and the islands around the city. The two witches, pulled together, stepped to the window to look out and up. It looked like fifty jet fighters were passing overhead at once, before breaking up by squadron to go to their assigned targets, still climbing into the sky, so many contrails that they were like the bristles of a broom.</p><p>Andy looked to her sister, and smiled with a savage ferocity which surprised Cissy, though it really shouldn’t have. “Come on, Cissy. I want to go <em> home. </em>”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. Captain First Rank Klimov is none other than Lt. Pavel Sergeevich Klimov from the film "Правда лейтенанта Климова" or "The Truth of Lieutenant Klimov" from 1982. Even if retired, at the start of the war, he would be recalled to active service. Past nuclear experience would be important for commanding a Project 1144.</p><p>2. The Mitrofan Moskalenko is of Project 1174 Nosorog, the only ship of that class assigned to the Northern Fleet. </p><p>3. The Relentless is a somewhat larger CATOBAR derivative of the CVF design, begun in response to the war in the Morsmordre controlled yards of Britain.</p><p>4. The S-3 Viking is a dedicated ASW aeroplane for carrier operations, subsequently retired in the USN; the E-2 is a still-active AEW (Airborne Early Warning) design.</p><p>5. HUMINT stands for HUMan INTelligence--intelligence on enemy activities derived from human sources of spying, rather than spying on electronics (SIGINT, SIGnals INTelligence).</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0060"><h2>60. The Second Battle of the North Sea</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Second Battle of the North Sea</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Standing on Captain Klimov’s bridge, Hermione and Bellatrix watched as a light drizzle and steady fog cover restricted visibility to 5km. It was said to ease as they went into the night; the mist and the fog had brought on what were already like night-time conditions, though.</p><p>Into the heart of this, the helicopters had travelled. They were not generally designed for all-weather operations, and the flight to the Shetlands had been executed earlier in the day. A small but significant part of the force had gone down or been lost, not guided in to safe landing on an island before they crashed. A few of these, the squadron had recovered survivors from, but most of those so unfortunate had died without facing the enemy.</p><p>The deck rolling under them underlined the tension. The boom of the guns showed how close to land they were. A speed run of eight hours duration had carried the squadron to within range of Baltasound on Unst, the northernmost of the larger islands within the Shetlands. Automatic 13cm guns on the destroyers were making short work of continued resistance around the airfield. A few minutes before, Bella and Hermione had been standing on the bridge wing, throwing <em> Bombarda Maxima </em>at the defenders as well, but the fading light made it difficult for even magically enhanced vision, and it had just ended up interfering with the radar-directed gunnery, anyway.</p><p>Captain Klimov stepped over to them, checking his watch and shaking his head softly. “Perhaps I will ask you to go back out, if they don’t manage to suppress resistance near the Sound soon. The A-40s are circling, they’re running low on fuel. We need to get them down if the men are to have enough ammunition for continued operations.”</p><p>“I can,” Bellatrix’s eyes flared. “But it’s a matter of choosing your poison. The enemy is in close enough contact that we’re bound to cause collateral casualties.”</p><p>“I know,” Klimov nodded, his voice quiet, eyes intense. He turned back to look through the bridge windows, spackled with rain, toward the green lowlands and the brown rock of the island. They were only slowed to 10 kts, circling off the island, because four attack submarines were guarding the position further out. The crack and flash of the shells hitting shore was dim and distant, compared to the recoil of the guns through the hull, invisible as they were mounted aft on the <em>Admiral Ushakov. </em></p><p>“If you’d stay ready, though?” Because, if it was necessary to keep the mission successful, of course they’d risk collateral casualties.</p><p>“Of course we will, Captain,” Hermione offered with a taut smile, and pushed Bellatrix away toward the bridge wing. She was narrowing her eyes thoughtfully, sharply.</p><p>The scream of fighters overhead could distantly be heard. Su-27s operating at long range with drop tanks from the Norwegian mainland, they were supported by A-50 AEW birds, also capable of refuelling them. There had been two air battles over the Shetlands already, but they were just from patrols of fighters launched out of Scotland; they had yet to be hit hard by one of the enemy’s naval strike forces, which boded well.</p><p>They could both hear one of the other officers step closer to Captain Klimov. “We’re out of time, Sir. Yes, it could be a few more minutes, but we’re just cutting the margin too close.”</p><p>He shot a look toward the two witches.</p><p>Bella didn’t even turn around. “Just tell them to land,” Bella instructed. “I’ll <em> take care of it.</em>”</p><p>The mustachioed officer closed his eyes for a moment, and exhaled with a puff of breath. “Signal them that they will be coming in against opposition,” he instructed.</p><p>“It’s not about suppressing the enemy,” Bella murmured, slipping her wand out. “It’s about getting those machines to land safely.”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes widened just in time, because glove in glove, a wave of Bella’s wand tore them away from the bridge of the <em> Ushakov </em>and deposited them on the shore before the Baltasound.</p><p>For the first time since 1998, Hermione stood on British soil. She was certainly unready for it. She was also unready for the dancing gesture, the whipping wand. <em> “Bombarda Maxima!</em>” An enormous explosion tore through a target as Bella, now standing with Hermione <em> behind </em>the enemy lines, could fire into them from enfilade to avoid their own troops.</p><p>Hermione shielded her from the burst of machine-gun fire that was immediately directed from the west with a quick <em> Protego. </em>Then, swinging around in front of her, Bella directed a column of flame in the direction of the fire. It was abruptly silenced.</p><p>A different droning noise could now be heard, turbofans at low altitude instead of the fast movers at high altitude. “All together, Hermione, with a shield.”</p><p>“Right, Bella.” The brown-eyed witch pressed herself, shoulder to shoulder, with her lover. They combined the power of their <em>Protego, Protego Perpetua, </em>and with blue energy crackling from their wands, conjured forth a square shield in the sky, approximating the position from which the gunfire of the defenders still issued.</p><p>It caught the first of the man-portable surface-to-air missiles. The missiles were the real threat, as the Beriev A-40s, the only jet-powered amphibious aeroplane in the world, descended on the bay, one after the other. Six of them, bringing supplies down to the VDV men who had executed a daring helicopter assault across the North Sea.</p><p>It was a whirl of motion. Bellatrix braced on Hermione abruptly. The shield faded as its scale exceeded the ability of two witches to maintain, but then, with a snap, she interposed it past each red dot as first one, then twice, thrice, four times, MANPADs were launched against the landing aeroplanes. Hermione quickly adapted her own stance, shifting to defend them with a quick series of shields against machine-gun and mortar fire from the remaining Morsmordre troops, leaning into the ground and centring herself. She realised that Bellatrix was using her as a brace to compensate for the fact that all of her magical moves, the ones that she had developed long ago, the motions to call forth magic—in fact, Bella had been negatively impacted by the loss of her arm in a subtle way. It wasn’t the exact same weight as the old one.</p><p>In all of the battles they had fought in so far, Bella had been metaphorically relying on Hermione like a shield-bearer fighting alongside of her, and covering her weaknesses. And now, in their first battle back on British soil, having returned to the fight as a <em> couple, </em>Together, Bellatrix had grown to trust Hermione enough to lean on her outright.</p><p>Lean on her literally, in battle and danger. Hermione bore down, braced herself, braced the brilliant madwoman she had come to love. Promised that she would never let her down.</p><p>Gave her all the cover she needed, until the last of the amphibians was down on the Baltasound, the water of the long sound churned up with the landing of the six in tight succession. Off-shore, the crack of the guns from the destroyers and frigates still sounded, but with them was the bright columns of light climbing into the foggy darkness, of surface-to-air missiles rising to engage targets.</p><p><em> Another air attack, </em> Hermione grimaced. They <em> really </em> needed to go. “We did it, Bella, we did it, and we <em> need to get back!</em>”</p><p>“One more good hit on the troops,” Bella cried, snapping off another spell. “You apparate!”</p><p>Hermione nodded, spun back with her hand on Bella’s, sighted the <em> Admiral Ushakov, </em>speeding up but also turning, her wake broad and combing white breakers in the fading light, as Captain Klimov tried to keep the ship in the same place for them even as he increased speed to make himself a harder target.</p><p>Bellatrix sent a final <em> Bombarda Maxima </em> into an uncovered mortar battery, and with a snap of magic and a sickening dislocation, her body continued through its motion only to fall against Hermione as they now stood on the heeling deck of the <em> Ushakov, </em>the inclinometer sharply learning to port as she turned and accelerated all at once.</p><p>“<em>Captain, the Witches are secure aboard!</em>”</p><p>“<em>Come about to course One-Five-Zero and ahead full!” </em>Hermione could hear Klimov’s voice inside the bridge. “Signal lights to the squadron only—we are underway on one-five-zero!”</p><p>“Signal lights only, Captain!”</p><p>Captain Klimov shot them a look as Hermione helped Bellatrix onto the bridge, behind them, some of the sailors swinging one of the big signal lights toward one of the destroyers, working the shutters to blink out a signal in morse code. “Forgive me, General, Colonel, but I would like a warning next time.”</p><p>“It was the only way to let the transports land,” Bellatrix shrugged as she helped herself back up to a standing position as the ship’s heel eased off—she was steadying out on course—and a grin twisted her lips. “Anyway, you did everything right. We were under air attack?”</p><p>“A squadron of Tornadoes, we weren’t sure if they were after the fleet or the troops—it wouldn’t matter, anyway.”</p><p>“Let me know if we come under air attack again, Captain.”</p><p>“I can only do that if you’re aboard the ship, General,” he smiled faintly. “I was a submariner, before my brief retirement. I’m not used to people leaving my ship!” He turned away and muttered, softly – “especially so that the computers must be reset. Twice.”</p><p>Bella sniffed.</p><p>“We’ll be retiring then, Captain,” Hermione interjected, before something like ‘impertinent muggle’ came out of Bella’s mouth, especially since she was bemused by Klimov’s humour. Hermione had started to sense when what she called pureblood syndrome was about to happen. “Five hours to be in position to engage Azkaban, yes?”</p><p>Klimov reflexively checked his watch. “Yes, Colonel.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Hermione tugged Bella down to the Admiral’s suite appropriated for her. Helped Bellatrix through. Closed it again.</p><p>“Sleeping draught?” She asked, nipping over to the enchanted sway-proof rack filled with potions and draughts.</p><p>“Make sure it will have me wide awake again in four hours,” Bellatrix answered, spinning and sitting on the bed.</p><p>“Of course. Bellatrix,” Hermione said as she turned away to work. “I want to apologise.”</p><p>“Pet?” Bella glanced up with a guileless innocence which in her was the happy place of the same expression which could change so quickly to gleeful madness.</p><p>“I didn’t appreciate, until today, just how much losing your arm had actually cost you. Your balance, the natural flow of the spells you had built up over so many years. I’m sorry. <em>I’m sorry. </em>I took the attitude that you were just being vain and petty. It didn’t occur to me that there might be other consequences that you might be hiding.”</p><p>“...Where’s the ‘but’, Pet? I can hear it!”</p><p>“Well, you could have told me,” Hermione said, turning toward Bella and smiling as she walked up with the draught. “...Right?”</p><p>Bellatrix snatched the draught quickly from Hermione’s hands… And then kissed her. “I didn’t think you’d care. Or worse, you’d <em> pity </em> me. Because let’s be clear, Hermione. It’s true, but don’t pity me, because I don’t deserve it. Oh I WANT to be pitied for it,” she laughed, “but I <em> don’t deserve it. </em>”</p><p>Hermione watched Bellatrix drop back to the bed, and prop herself up as she drank the sleeping draught. Then she went back for her own, still watching Bella. “Fair,” she acknowledged with a smile, a real smile.</p><p>“Good. There’s enough pity in this relationship as it is.”</p><p>“Why do you say that?” With the beginnings of a sleepy yawn, the younger witch walked closer, standing over Bella, pressing close up alongside and reaching out to hug her head. Bellatrix leaned into her hips with a sigh.</p><p>“When the whole world knows you’re my wife, you’ll never have a day of peace again. My lust to possess you – is always warring with the knowledge that I am an anchor around your neck.”</p><p>Hermione started to softly cry. “Thank you, Bella. But stop worrying about it. Just like you, I made my own damned choices.”</p><p>Bella couldn't help it; of course she cackled. “Then we both make terrible choices, pet.”</p><p>In the end, even though the bed was much too small for two people, they both slept in it, anyway.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>“The Nimitz taskgroup has the Denmark Strait. Still no sign of any enemy force,” Palliser reported as he stepped back in to the chart-room. With the <em>Inflexible </em>at stations, the entire crew—except for the Witches and Wizards, who remained in their robes and trusted their magic—was in their anti-flash gear, Captain included.</p><p>“Thank you, Captain. What is our current course and speed?”</p><p>“We’re steering zero-one-zero, M’lord. Two-five knots.” Palliser paused for a moment. “Anything from Thule?”</p><p>“They say they have sighted nothing. They send wizards up on brooms.” Blaise shrugged diffidently. The government of the all-wizard island of Thule south of Jan Mayen was aligned with Voldemort, but being pureblood wizarding ground, their refusal to let a muggle garrison on the island had been accepted, and of course, the ghastly conditions on Jan Mayen meant its garrison was more or less useless.</p><p>But both men were playing a game for formalism’s sake, for the sake of keeping everyone where they needed to be, right until the moment that they didn’t need to be there anymore.</p><p>There was just one problem, really. They had no idea how much of the enemy force was in confidence to the plan. Therefore, at a minimum, their air defences had to be constantly ready to repel attack… And their ASW forces had to be top-notch.</p><p>The plotting table showed the problem clearly. There were at least eight Victor IIIs—Project 671 attack submarines—positioned between the Morsmordre forces and the Russian North Fleet taskgroups in the Norwegian Sea. They were not intentionally pressing hard to find or attack them, but there was a risk, due to the absence of information—the reality of the situation with their admittedly treasonous communications—that those submarines <em> were </em> hunting for <em> them. </em>Behind them were at least three Akulas, Project 971s, and two Project 945s, Sierras. At least four of the Oscar SSGNs—Project 949—were also somewhere in the mix, carrying two dozen P-700 missiles each.</p><p>The sharp sound of a Typhoon hitting the trap aft echoed distantly up to the chart room. Engines were screaming forward on another one in the rotation ready to be catapulted off. Around them were the ten surface ships in the escort group, dispersed at 7km intervals—nuclear dispersal range. One hundred klicks away, the <em> Relentless </em>was pacing them to the west.</p><p>Two games at once. Blaise stepped back and thought about it. Until it didn’t matter anymore, he had to pretend he was a loyal servant of the Dark Lord. So he had to execute a serious engagement. The enemy had executed a daring airborne assault on the Shetland Islands. They had detected a large cruiser force to the east of the islands, which had closed to the point of providing gunfire support. There were two Russian carrier groups to the north of them. There was one to the southeast, the Baltic Fleet force, already in the North Sea. The land-based aviation would have to deal with them regardless.</p><p>With the Americans for support, it was four on two. It helped that there were no satellites. That meant there was no precise intel on the location of the enemy. The fact that they had not yet found and engaged them made sense in context. At that point, one of the American carriers was to the northwest of Iceland, one to the southeast. Right where Blaise and Palliser wanted them.</p><p><em> I need to draw this out as long as possible. The longer we shadow-box with the enemy, the better when the time comes. </em>“Bring both taskgroups to course one-three-five. Inform Admiral Mattheson that we are going to launch a night attack on the cruiser squadron supporting the aerial desant against the Shetlands. He needs to advance to the north with his carriers. He should assume that the enemy is not within fifty kilometres of the shore of Thule, but no more than that.”</p><p>“Of course, M’lord.” Palliser paused. “We’ll be in a position where we’ll have no choice but to launch a heavy attack on the forces on the Shetlands, if we’re to be convincing, if the operation hasn’t materialised by about ten hundred hours tomorrow morning. There is a risk that Minister Thicknesse will directly order you to use the tactical nuclear weapons on the <em>Belfast </em>against the VDV division on the islands. The MinKol personnel there, M’lord, are the ones who are supposed to support <em>us </em>when the time comes.”</p><p>The <em> Belfast, </em> accompanying his taskgroup; the elderly cruiser reactivated for the <em> sole </em> fact that her 152mm guns—bored out to 155mm—were big enough to handle nuclear shells. “I’m aware, Captain.” Blaise looked cold. He <em> had </em>to be cold. “We will accept the risk. We may not need the support, if we must keep our cover until then, it will help all of us.”</p><p>“Understood.” Palliser pulled down the flash mesh over his face and went for tea, while he had the chance. Blaise followed him. That was one that united muggle and wizard, in this moment.</p><p>That, and a full appreciation of what they might have to do to men who were technically on their side, but didn’t know it yet.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The main invasion convoy had left the Trondheimsfjord that morning, and headed southwest through the protected internal waters of the Trondheimsleia, the deep-water protected channel carrying as far south as Kristiansund. It was the actual collection of heavy Russian and some Scandinavian amphibious landing assets, along with a few converted civilian Ro-Ros of the largest type. The smaller converted civilian Ro-Ros were held back at Ålesund, and it was from Ålesund that a smaller group of amphibs had departed only to return again and rendezvous with the main force, after forming a diversion.</p><p>Once the two forces together, with a single destroyer leading the escort, surrounded by a large number of Project 1135 frigates, Narcissa and her staff had gone out to join the <em> Mitrofan Moskalenko. </em>Since it was an amphibious flagship, there was no need for an undignified transfer via helicopter to avoid risking issues with the electronics. She apparated.</p><p>Now they had everyone. Draco, Larissa, Luna, Tonks, all within the staff and operational planning spaces aboard the very large LPD, displacing 14,000 tons at full load. With them were 25 tanks, 45 BMP-2s, and about six hundred troops. Two Ka-52 attack helicopters were carried as deck cargo, to fly off before regular utility operations with the smaller onboard helicopters began.</p><p>Narcissa felt that the dozen MinKol wizards and witches she was with were a greater Russian support to her ambition than all of that rot. But she did appreciate the hot tea aboard, the wood décor in the planning rooms—even if it was all fake and actually plastic (actually, the fact the muggles could do that was admittedly sort-of impressive. She’d have to ask Andy about fake wood later). The food? Well, she could certainly <em> appreciate </em>it.</p><p>Four of the MinKol wizards were up on deck, providing air guard against an air attack on the convoy. It made the most sense for those wizards who were guarding against air attack, to be on the amphibs on the civilian ships—it meant that the escorts would have their radars unimpeded, and both could be used at once.</p><p>What consumed Narcissa’s attention at the moment was the position of the so-called Surface Action Squadron. With it, her sister had slipped away to the south, deep into the North Sea. But Narcissa had a charm from long ago—she had made it with her sister’s help when she was in her second year at Hogwarts—which showed her where Bellatrix was. She could watch it creep across the map.</p><p>And if it became necessary to risk such precision information being <em> broadcast, </em>she could, if necessary, tell the muggle forces about it. But for the moment, she was silent, occasionally watching the little enchanted silver jackdaw move across the chart. The vapour wafted up from her tea, and she glanced again at the chart. They were over the Viking Bank, moving southwest toward Scotland. The Baltic Fleet was orbiting south of them, west of Stavanger. Her sister was two hundred nautical miles from her, but she might as well have been on Mars.</p><p>Then music struck up behind her. She spun back with such surprise that she splashed a bit of tea on the floor. It was Luna, who had used some bag of holding or another to manage to bring a guitar onto the ship. She’d taken it out and started to strum it.</p><p>“In sixteen hundred and forty-two I knew what I had to do… Leave my home and family too, and fight for Old Charlie!”</p><p>“...In sixteen hundred and forty-three, those roundheads, they were after me—but we were on a winning spree, fighting for Old Charlie!”</p><p>“In sixteen hundred and forty-four, we fought a battle at Marston Moor—many men died to uphold the law, fighting for Old Charlie!”</p><p>“Of course she’d start singing a cavalier ballad,” Tonks murmured, walking over to Narcissa as they got to the ghastlier and more bitter parts of the song. “Though I do admit, Heaven or Devon is a tough choice,” referencing the next part of the song.</p><p>“Oh thank you,” Narcissa answered with a flat droll tone. Then she raised her voice. “Thank you, Luna. We have, indeed, endured an interregnum, and as that song was first sung in victory in London, so we will honour our King Charles by singing it again.” A deft declaration, which turned the song into a bloody-minded prideful anthem instead of something that was rather dark. Then she wandered over to Luna’s side.</p><p>“Miss Lovegood, is something a-matter, that you’ve decided to sing?”</p><p>Luna smiled. “Well, we <em> are </em>fighting for King Charles,” she noted. “So it seemed to fit! Anyway, I just wanted to pass the time with a song, Madame Malfoy. This morning will be special, and I can’t sleep.”</p><p>“It will?”</p><p>“Yes. Draco will need to be busy.”</p><p><em> Oh Gods. He’ll be needed with the Ushakov. </em> “Thank you, Luna. I know you can’t be more precise than that. Thank you.” She spun on heel. <em> Get him to bed, get him rested while he has the chance. </em></p><p>
  <em> What the hell is going to go wrong, Bella? </em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Mostly military terminology notes today, except:</p><p>1. It seemed to make sense that one consequence for Bellatrix is that in terms of her dancer's style of casting magic, it's actually impaired by the different balance of her arm. I certainly would feel this when dancing the flankirovka.</p><p>2. Luna, Luna, Luna...</p><p>3. I decided to make the mysterious island of Thule an actual small, entirely wizard-inhabited island which is Unplottable to muggles. .. Normally anyway.</p><p>4. Jan Mayen is a small island northeast of Iceland at the northern edge of the Norwegian Sea. It's quite real. </p><p>5. Fighting For Old Charlie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9b7bRb6P5I</p><p>Military terminology:</p><p>1. "Nimitz Taskgroup" -- a force built around an American Nimitz-class CVN.</p><p>2. Course headings--these are compass bearings, measured to the right, with 0 - 0 - 0 being Due North.</p><p>3. "Belfast" is presently a museum ship in London. Her 6" guns are larger than anything in service in the modern British military, and they're about the smallest guns that can fire a nuclear shell.</p><p>4. SSGN -- Submarine, Nuclear, Guided Missile (launching).</p><p>5. ASW -- Anti-Submarine Warfare.</p><p>6. MANPAD -- as a reminder, Man Portable Air Defence. </p><p>7. Ka-52 is the Kamov "Alligator", originally designed the "Hookum" by NATO.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0061"><h2>61. The Maelstrom</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Bellatrix woke after too little sleep, but of course, it was always too little sleep, now. Even on the best of nights, she could remember the screams in her mind and soul. Hermione quieted them, just enough to make a night with her more bearable than one without. So, the elder witch rolled over, and hugged her lover, and was tangled into her—the bed was much too small for gestures of affection.</p><p>Her muscles were sore.</p><p><em> You should have slept apart. </em>But she would have never gotten any sleep at all, then.</p><p>Bellatrix grabbed her wand from the bedstand, and pointed it at the teapot. Muttering something half incoherent, the effort still proved adequate to get it boiling.</p><p>Hermione stirred under her, reaching up and grabbing—hands, tracing, groping at her breasts. “Mmmnn, not enough time for that, pet,” she laughed, shaking her head, and pressed down to plant a kiss on Hermione’s lips.</p><p>“Was just trying to figure out where you were,” Hermione muttered, her face covered in Bella’s tangled falling hair. Some got in her mouth. “Mmff.”</p><p>“Serves you right for groping me an hour before a battle,” Bella continued nonetheless, laughing, and pushing herself upright to clear the way for Hermione. Her head felt like shit, but the usual energy, the intensity of anticipation, surged within her. It had not failed her yet. She got up and walked, as naked as the day she were born, to the enchanted teapot. A thick dark glass was measured out as she turned, cupping it in her hands, as Hermione padded over to get her own. In her bare feet, she could feel the rumbling of the deck below. They were running at speed.</p><p>Hermione pushed up against her, holding her own glass. It wasn’t uncomfortable aboard the <em> Ushakov, </em>the steam heat worked just fine. So they stood there, two mostly naked witches pressed up against each other, taking a precious moment to drink tea.</p><p>The clock chimed. The end came too fucking fast. Bellatrix sat her glass down, and pecked Hermione on the cheek with a gleeful grin that she just couldn’t help. “Come on, my brilliant witch. Captain Klimov and his crew will be waiting for us to work our magic.” Inside, her need for vindication warred with her fear of old memories.</p><p>Azkaban, sitting there in the grip of the cruel sea. The sea was around her, she could feel it in the bones of the ship. Just like the sea was omnipresent in the hammer of the waves against the walls of Azkaban.</p><p>Azkaban, built like the prow of a demon ship facing into the worst of the prevailing winds. The massive, smooth, magically constructed tower of the main prison—the main part where Bellatrix had been held—was almost designed to take the surf, having been built on a rock outcropping which was barely above water at low tide. Near to it had been the larger proper Island, rendered Unplottable. Here, a more traditional fortress had been built centuries before, where less threatening prisoners and the limited non-Dementor staff lived. It was also where the burying ground for prisoners who died incarcerated was maintained.</p><p>Getting to spot the island out of a window of the great triangular tower had been one of the only diversions from the endless wet grey stone and pounding waves. Now, Bellatrix hastily dressed with that vision locked in her mind. Even with the rest of her body naked, she had hidden her arm, even from her lover. But on her bare right wrist remained the scar of her shackles in Azkaban.</p><p>There were too many scars to keep track of to hide them all.</p><p>Somehow, seeing them didn’t make Hermione change her mind.</p><p>
  <em> I’m not in Azkaban. I’m alive today. Here. Right now. What do I have? I have my wand. My daughter is safe. Two booted feet, on the deck of a warship. </em>
</p><p><em> My lover is standing next to me. </em>Bellatrix glanced slowly to Hermione, who, finishing buttoning her uniform jacket, was gesturing toward the door. It was time to go.</p><p>Bellatrix hastily finished cinching her corset, her uniform jacket worn over it. Today, she would use all the protection that the dragon-skin armour could give her. She left the jacket unbuttoned. Klimov and his crew could deal. A ghost of a smile traced across her lips, and it was intensely dangerous. <em> Who has ever needed more in all of the world than what I have right now? </em></p><p>Glove to skin, she took Hermione’s hand, and holding hands they turned for the door and opened it. Only then, in public, they let go. Hermione fell in, military regulation, a half step behind and to the left. Their boots snapped crisply against the decking.</p><p>Crewmen going about their business came to attention and saluted as Bellatrix and Hermione marched down the corridors and up the ladders from deck to deck. To them, they were a General and a Colonel. Two death-dealing magic users.</p><p><em> You probably think we’re monsters, but we’re your monsters, </em>Bellatrix smirked wolfishly. She understood, a bit, why Narcissa had started to play muggle politics. There was something gratifying about the gestures of respect.</p><p>They were on the bridge within a minute. Klimov saluted—he had a shadow on the parts of his face where he didn’t keep a beard, now. His expression was grim, and Hermione lost all expression on her face as she saw it. From the interplay, Bellatrix immediately knew that something was wrong.</p><p>“General, Colonel,” he addressed them. “Right on time, thank you. We have a developing problem.”</p><p>“Go on,” Bellatrix sighed. An orderly offered tea, she took the cup automatically.</p><p>“We will be at the launch position for the first salvo in thirty minutes, as planned. However, in another twelve minutes a force of forty-two attack planes is going to be hitting us. The <em>Admiral Kornilov </em>group is already under heavy air-sea attack by another force, and they cannot provide a CAP for us. The squadron will be relying on our air-defence missiles and,” he smiled thinly, “magic.”</p><p>“We’ll start on the missiles immediately, and then engage the enemy from the deck when they attack,” Bellatrix smiled over her cup of tea. “Swat a few down for me if you would? We’ll see who gets more.”</p><p>She drained the rest with a convulsive jerk of her hand, feeling the heat burn in her throat. “Let’s go, Hermione. It’s time.”</p><p>Klimov tipped a salute to them and turned away to face his crew. “Comrades! Prepare for anti-air battle!”</p><p>Hermione barely had enough time to put down her tea—Bellatrix grinned wickedly—as the elder witch reached out and grabbed her hand. “There will be time for more later!” Abruptly, they both disapparated.</p><p>“<em>Fuck! Bella, give me more warning!</em>” Hermione was exclaiming as they now both stood by the first of the open missile silos on the foredeck. The ship’s alarms that howled around them seemed distant and muted as the fog closed in.</p><p>Bella tossed her head back and laughed, full of joy and hope and wild delight. “You’re lovely when you’re flustered! Let’s get to work!” Clambering down in the scaffolding, pressed close and tight—the close quarters would be intimate, if not for the shortness of the time in which they had to work. It took the two of them three minutes to complete the work—climb down, one minute and thirty seconds to complete the intricate set of six involved spells they had agreed to—climb out and move to the next missile tube with Hermione five seconds behind, her job to secure the hatches on the missiles as they left one to go on to the next, and then support Bella with three of the spells that needed two witches to complete.</p><p>They got through enchanting the nuclear warheads on three P-700 ‘Granit’ missiles before the first of the powerful S-300F SAMs tore out of the launchers toward one of the incoming targets. A burst of light and a rapidly laid column of white smoke rising into the mist marked each one of the missiles, as several of the ships in the dispersed, anti-nuclear-attack formation began to fire. The shots from distant ships were visible as strange flickers of light through the mist.</p><p>“One more, come on, Bella, we can do it, that’s all we need to hit Azkaban!” Hermione was exclaiming, urging her own.</p><p><em> We need to defend the ship, too, </em>Bella thought, but the temptation was much too great. They absolutely needed to be ready to launch. And they had time. Those were long-range missiles being fired now. Together they dropped down, and worked on the last of the P-700s.</p><p>The missiles were still firing as they completed the work, but now the Osa-Ms were firing too. The enemy was coming in very close, moving supersonic to close through the missile fire, then making their final targeting approaches.</p><p>Bella leapt her lover’s shoulders to the deck and steadied herself, a leather gloved hand yanking Hermione the rest of the way into the salt spray and metal. The first four missiles were ready, that was the batch aimed at Azkaban. Now the enemy was coming out. “<em> Revelatio Hostilis, </em>” she commanded, creating around her a set of red dots that projected to the locations of the enemy; she aimed her wand against them, and cast them in the distance, with lead, against the buzzing dots which showed her where her foes were.</p><p>Hermione was at her side, marking off of her own spell. They were united together in purpose. Some of the dots vanished… But the ability of the combat system to manage the situation was being completely overwhelmed. The enemy was coming in much too fast.</p><p>So they switched to <em> Protego. </em>In fact, they managed to shield the ship’s bow with perfect effect. The Tornadoes coming in were each carrying two 2000lb “Paveway III” laser-guided bombs. As they tore overhead, Hermione and Bellatrix turned their attention from the fighters themselves to bouncing the bombs off quickly cast shields.</p><p>Three, four, five, seven… Of forty-two fighters that had begun the attack, only four had closed to drop their bombs on the <em> Admiral Ushakov. </em>The witches and wizards aboard got seven of them.</p><p>The explosion as the 2000lb semi-armour piercing bomb detonated in the starboard quarter shook Bellatrix down to her marrow. The ship seemed to lurch beneath them, as a massive red fireball rose, and the concussive blast along the deck sent electronic components, parts of missile launchers and gun mounts, flying into the air, and wrecked some of the ship’s boats. Flames licked angrily and immediately up through the hole in the deck where the buckled superstructure was obscured by roiling columns of smoke. She was driven to her knees on the deck.</p><p>Hermione dragged her back to her feet. “Come on, Bella!” She was calling. “We’ve got to finish.”</p><p>“We’ve got to <em>save the ship,</em>” Bella exclaimed instead, gesturing aft to where the flames licked across the deck. The <em>Admiral Ushakov </em>was immense, and had extensive armour. The smoke was still coming from her funnel, she was still running at speed toward the launch point for the missiles, some of her radars were still up and tracking, some of the missile launchers and AK-630 mounts were still turning, adjusting, preparing for the potential for another attack. Crewmen were moving with purpose across the deck, hauling heavy pumps and fire-fighting hoses.</p><p>“Alright… I trust your judgement,” Hermione murmured, and reached out and grabbed her hand again. “This time, <em>ready</em>!”</p><p>They arrived on the bridge just in time to see Captain Klimov looking through his binoculars to the west, at a huge column of smoke and flame licking high into the sky, obscuring whatever it was from. “We lost the <em> Admiral Kharlamov, </em>” he was noting grimly to his executive officer.</p><p>“Well, we haven’t the time for that,” Bellatrix snapped, ignoring the stiff expression from Hermione. It was a lot of dead muggles and probably some dead wizards sure, but they just did not have the time for regrets at the moment. “Captain Klimov, how bad is the damage?”</p><p>“The fire is spreading aft. There’s a risk of a detonation in the 10cm gun magazines, so I’ve already ordered them flooded,” he answered in a distracted voice. “General, you should have moved on to arming—enchanting, whatever—the RPK-3s. We don’t have enough time.”</p><p>The RPK-3s were easier to get to, but they didn’t normally have the range for the attack on the Chunnel. They would have to be enchanted to make their fuel last longer—another complicated spell that they had drilled in advance.</p><p>“And the ship?!” Bellatrix answered, a small part of her admiring Klimov’s calmness but mostly just tense, herself.</p><p>“The longer we stay at speed, the further aft the fire will spread. We will fight it—God help us. But for the moment we have power, we have our attack missiles, we are holding course, the flooding is minimal. So, we will hold course and speed and continue the attack. But, General, there is a second wave of fighters coming in, and we are getting close to exhausting our air-defence missiles. Between yesterday and now this attack, we have been in heavy combat. Now we will have to orbit the second launch position to wait while you finish enchanting the missiles.”</p><p>“Can we launch the P-700s now?” Hermione asked tautly, flickering her eyes to Bellatrix. But they held faith, not anger, at Bella’s decision to retreat back to the bridge. It made Bellatrix feel ashamed.</p><p>Klimov looked down at the deck to see about the crews removing the scaffolding. Apparently, he was satisfied. “Yes, we can, Colonel.” Klimov picked up one of the internal phones; he pressed the switch for the weapons officer whose duty was surface action engagement. “Have the computers adjust the inertial trajectory for an immediate launch of the full P-700 battery, Commander. Clear the forward deck! Stand by to fire.”</p><p>“Sir!” Alarms sent any sailors near the massive battery of twenty heavy anti-ship missiles clearing out of the area, just after they had finished clearing the tubes of the nuclear armed missiles. Flashing lights indicated the deck to be clear, even as the fires spread aft. The targeting computer showed the inertial course toward Azkaban. The missiles were enchanted to home terminally on magic.</p><p>It would have to be enough. With a tongue of flame behind them, the massive missile rose into the air at near to a forty-five degree angle above and ahead of the ship. The first of them. In twenty seconds they had launched three. In one minute, eight. The nuclear-tipped missiles were mixed in with the conventional missiles, so that the defences of Azkaban were less likely to take out the nuclear tipped ones. A shell game. A matter of probabilities.</p><p>Then the RPK-3s would fire, toward the Strait of Dover. But with their magical enchantments on their range, the defences in Azkaban would easily disable them if they were not taken out first. Well, they were now attacking Azkaban, with weapons that a multi-month effort had been put into making possible the destruction of Azkaban. Bellatrix bit down on her teeth until they hurt, and that just reminded her, as she clenched her jaw, how like as not she’d have broken a tooth doing that only a year before—thanks to Azkaban.</p><p>Sixteen…</p><p>“How will you prepare the RPK-3s?” Klimov turned to her brusquely. He was an experienced officer and the sight of a full ripple launch of the P-700s on his ship was not enough to distract him from the many urgent tasks around him, of which the most urgent was the launch of the enchanted RPK-3s in the next attack.</p><p>
  <em> How am I going to do it, exactly? We don’t have enough time. </em>
</p><p><em> Oh, that’s obvious. </em>Bella smiled a positively winning smile. “I’m going to use the ship’s electrical grid to reach out and enchant all of the missiles at once.”</p><p>Klimov stared for a moment. “I thought that was impossible.”</p><p>“Not for her, Captain,” Hermione looked with wonder at Bellatrix, a wonder that Bellatrix felt distinctly too kind at the moment. She hadn’t actually done it yet, after all, and there was a… <em>You’re a fucking Black, and you’re not going to fail.</em></p><p>She took her wand out. The launch of the ship’s main battery had been completed. Twenty P-700 missiles were now heading at supersonic speeds toward the fortress of Azkaban. More to the point, if they were about to come under heavy air attack again, the ship no longer had a massive part of her forward section filled with vulnerable rocket fuel. And she had completed the first half of her mission.</p><p>The ship’s power flickered, and flickered again. Glowing blue, energy from Bella’s wand suffused into the walls. The computers’ monitors overrode their normal displays with strange semi-fractal wave functions.</p><p>Klimov, turning back from giving orders to his chief damage control officer, stared at them for a moment, and whispered behind Bellatrix, to Hermione: “this could impact our ability to successfully target the incoming strike wave with the defensive missiles.”</p><p>Bellatrix ignored them. She pulled out every spell of electrical magic that she had developed. She forged them all toward war. She thought of Hermione, she thought of a happy Hermione, at peace. She thought of Delphini. <em> Damn you all, I am going to do it. There’s only one way out of this war—forward. </em></p><p>They were all behind her, they were all counting on her. Whether or not she would be remembered as Judas or Bernadotte come again very much depended on the way she improvised her spells to do things she had never imagined as a teenager, in the heat of the moment. To turn the electronics into a magical carrier wave function to transmit the information of other spells. The magical energy left her muscles and nerves tingling with backfeed from the electrical leads. Left them both feeling it, like a mild electrical current running through their bodies...</p><p>For Hermione stepped up to her side and joined in the spells that needed both of them, sending them to all of the missiles at once. Together, they did it, holding nothing back. There was a little enchanted monitor on the bridge, made to provide Klimov with the status of the missiles, when it had been supposed they would be enchanting them all while belowdecks.</p><p>Now, it flickered to green.</p><p>“Sir, we are reading two three, repeat two three fighters entering the outer air defence envelope range!”</p><p>Bellatrix sagged back and collapsed into Hermione’s arms. “It’s done, Captain!” Hermione shouted. “We’ve got three minutes before they’re in laser-guided bomb range, that’s enough time, launch them all, launch them all!”</p><p>Around them, men were pulling connections to computers and electronics and shoving them back in again, checking their watches with growing nervousness and watching screens of old electronics slowly rebooting, muttering curses.</p><p>Klimov picked up the intercom again. “Weapons, commence the RPK-3 engagement.” He slowly lowered the phone and looked to Hermione. “Colonel, if you and the General can still fight, we need you badly. The air defence computers are still re-starting.”</p><p>Her muscles randomly sparking, Bellatrix twitched while leaning into Hermione’s arms, forged so strong by the hardship of war. “Bella,” she could hear her lover saying, “we need you. We need you. You’ve done it, we’ve launched the attack, but if we’re going to survive, <em> Bella, we need you! </em>”</p><p><em> You just attacked Azkaban. Can’t you muster enough energy to celebrate your victory? Fuck you! </em>She screamed at herself, right up until Bella started cackling. She laughed hysterically. She gripped so hard onto Hermione’s arm that her lover winced in pain, and then, seeing the resolution within her, began to drag her to the bridge wing.</p><p>The last of the modified anti-submarine missiles leapt from the launchers. Fourteen in all, travelling south, counting that Azkaban would not be there to stop them when it counted, laden with magic—and nukes. Hermione dragged her out onto the bridge wing. It had started raining, but it was doing nothing against the growing fires aft.</p><p>
  <em> Fire… Fire. </em>
</p><p>“We don’t have enough time to whittle their numbers, Bella, <em>what can we do?” </em>Hermione was crying out in agitation as she readied a <em>Protego. </em></p><p>
  <em> Fire. </em>
</p><p>Bellatrix cast a quick electrical detection spell. She could <em> feel </em>the power of the re-started radars, brought back on-line too late for the engagement envelope of the long-range S-300F missiles. The Osa missiles were firing, but one of the two launchers had been disabled by the first bomb hit. It was not nearly enough. The AK-630s were getting ready to fire, at point-blank, to try and shoot down the bombs out of the sky. The rest of the fleet was firing every last missile they had left with all the desperate intensity the weapons officers and missile-men could manage.</p><p>They had no air cover…</p><p>
  <em> But that means there’s nobody in the way. </em>
</p><p>No preparation, no complex spells. Bellatrix had just been channelling magic through electricity in wires. Now she channelled magic through electricity in the air—radar waves. No time for targeted spells. She pulled herself up from another spasm and smiled at Hermione, at her lover at the end of her rope. <em> Don’t worry, pet. </em></p><p>She straightened up and snapped her wand-hand through the motion, with only a small variation.</p><p>But an absolutely critical one.</p><p>“<em>Fiendfyre Elektra!</em>”</p><p>Using the radar waves as a carrier wave function, she projected a casting of Fiendfyre through the air, with the magic, living fire spreading everywhere there was the carrier wave—which meant everywhere in a rising cone around the ship. It singed the masts of the other ships. The sheer heat of the sheer intensity of the flame made the flags on the tops of some spontaneously combust as a wall of flame spread over them.</p><p>Bellatrix could feel her skin sunburning under the intensity of the flame above them, like it was a nuclear blast. The incoming laser-guided bombs vanished into secondary detonations in mid-air in the sky above. A few flashes on the wave-front of the fire marked the immolation of a dozen of the attacking jets.</p><p>Hermione’s mouth formed into a perfect, silent “O” of shock for a moment. And then, as Bellatrix, like she were in an out-of-body experience, felt herself dropping down to the deck, Hermione turned, pounded across the deck for the door to the bridge, screaming as loudly as she could in Russian. “TURN THE RADARS OFF TURN THEM ALL OFF RIGHT NOW! KLIMOV! TURN THEM OFF TURN THEM OFF FOR THE LOVE OF GOD TURN THEM OFF!”</p><p>Bellatrix dropped down to the deck. Her muscles were shaking, she thought she might be seizing. It didn’t matter, she was laughing too even if her muscles were spasming uncontrollably. “Good mudpet!” she stuttered, losing it, forgetting to be nice, forgetting to not use slurs—did it really matter right now? her brain wondered—cackling as she collapsed into a ball, even in agony, not caring that she was in agony.</p><p>“<em>Which one!?” </em>some of the radar techs were shouting.</p><p>Hermione didn’t know, but she did know her lover, and Bella grinned as she heard the words. “THE STRONGEST!”</p><p>Klimov flung himself against the console for the Voshkod MR-800 and directly pulled the power bus, regardless of the shutdown procedure.</p><p>The carrier wave collapsed, and the Fiendfyre above them abruptly vanished in a last roiling puff of smoke, just before the return waves curled back into the battlecruiser below.</p><p>Bellatrix curled into herself on the bridge wing, cackling and cackling. “See me now, Voldemort, you have nothing on this!”</p><p>Then one of the remaining Tornadoes, coming in late and with a pilot just skilled enough to avoid being stalled out and flung into the sea by the massive thermal shockwave in the atmosphere ahead of his aeroplane, swung back in on an attack line against the <em> Ushakov, </em>plainly visible in the North Sea below from the ugly column of black smoke that she was trailing from her fires aft.</p><p>Like many a man who fought for the Morsmordre, he no doubt had a family at home to keep safe from the retribution of Voldemort’s secret agents. And he no doubt knew, too, that the only sure way to give them a future was to do his duty to the last bitter end. So, together with his weapons officer, they ‘pickled’ their bombs.</p><p>Bellatrix reached through her spasms, with her golden, enchanted left arm—grabbed the wand from her twitching right hand. “<em>Protego!</em>” she hissed through clenched teeth. The golden arm had no muscles to spasm, the motion was true.</p><p>One of the bombs ricocheted violently away from the ship, spinning back through the atmosphere like a top.</p><p>The second clipped the edge of the shield, but the tiny control computer in the laser seeker head was undamaged. The weapons officer in the back of the Tornado applied a last second full correction to the guidance system. It was not enough to hit the ship full on…</p><p>...The bomb slammed into the water, again the starboard quarter was targeted, now right aft. For a moment, it seemed like a miss… And then it skipped into the side of the stern, and a huge column of white water rose into the air from the skip-hit, and the hull buckled up and surged up in a mass of twisted metal and quickly extinguished flames along the waterline.</p><p>Hermione reached her side, grabbed her, and started to drag her in. “Come on Bella, you’ve done enough, you’ve done enough, you’ve saved us,” she was crying as she dragged Bellatrix inside. But Bella had a terrible bad feeling about it all. A terrible bad feeling.</p><p>The younger witch had just dragged her inside when it happened. They could feel magic filling their bodies. They could feel it from end to end. Even the muggles turned and looked, shifted uncomfortably, grew tense. Klimov, receiving the damage control report from the latest hit, froze in place.</p><p>For a brief and unsteady, sickening moment, they could all feel the ship pushed up under them, accelerating upwards, so that they were forced into the deck. It felt like a rocket or an aeroplane taking off, but almost straight up, and seemed to come from nothing. The sea around them boiled unnaturally.</p><p>A massive pulsating magical energy field of green and black colours flickered and rose in the sky above, and then, reflected like from a funhouse mirror within, a massively enlarged mushroom cloud towered in the sky.</p><p>“My God…” Klimov muttered, and softly, and more terrifying for being soft.</p><p>“Pet,” Bellatrix cried, not caring that they were in public now, not now. “What in Merlin’s name is <em>going on</em>?”</p><p>Hermione pressed herself to the bridge windows ahead and looked at the terrible sight rising into the sky, for Bella’s sake, the older woman still collapsed on the deck of the ship. “I think… I think, Bella… We just got Azkaban.”</p><p>The helmsman turned toward Klimov. “Captain, she’s still not answering the helm! We’re turning through two hundred degrees and continuing to circle to starboard. I can’t hold course.”</p><p>“What is that in the distance?” Hermione murmured. “It’s a white line on the horizon.”</p><p>Klimov seemed remarkably composed, as only a professional long-service man could. But after he lifted his binoculars and looked out, he just shook his head a single time and muttered. “It shouldn’t have done that… No nuclear weapon that should be that powerful.”</p><p>“Pet?” Bella asked again, trying to muster the strength to drag herself up.</p><p>“Captain Klimov?” Hermione asked a second time, now, her voice rising and more panic leaching in.</p><p>“That’s a tidal wave. And she won’t answer the helm. That last bomb hit jammed the rudder. We’re turning broadside on.”</p><p>As he finished speaking, Hermione raised her wand just in time, to shield them—and the bridge, and the bridge windows—from a staggering, magically enhanced nuclear blast shockwave, which tore across the whole length of the distance from Azkaban to the <em> Ushakov </em>and slammed into the superstructure and hull with the power to send them heeling further to starboard, the inclinometer reaching fifteen degrees list before she steadied out and began to return to an even keel, men sent flying and falling, radar aerials ripped off the masts and sent tumbling into the furious churning sea below, a damage control party torn from the decks and flung with terrible force into the sea to instantly drown.</p><p>And the wave was getting closer.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>On the <em> Mitrofan Moskalenko, </em> Narcissa had made haste up to the deck with the others wizards and witches. They could feel the horrifying intensity of the magical energy coursing through their bodies. Even at their great distance of hundreds of nautical miles, they could <em> see </em>the black and green energies rising into the sky.</p><p>Around them, the sea was frothing. Under the deck, the ship <em> rose, </em> with a kind of terrible force from below. The <em> sea around them </em> seemed to rise. They could <em> see </em>the mushroom cloud of the nuclear weapon which, Narcissa could only imagine, had destroyed the enchanted fortress of Azkaban and all the Dementors within.</p><p>Tonks cast a spell ahead of them which, to their horror, revealed a welling power—an enchanted shockwave in the air.</p><p>Narcissa amplified her voice. “Captain, <em> turn into the shockwave! </em>”</p><p>“Helm a port!” The massive amphib began to swing, other ships in the formation following her.</p><p>Larissa and Draco stepped up together with a dual series of interlocking shields. They cut the wave in two, parting it around the ship, and with a shaking, a roaring, and the painful popping of their ears, it passed over them, leaving them unharmed.</p><p>But the <em> Mitrofan Moskalenko </em> was <em> three hundred and fifty nautical miles from Azkaban. </em> Narcissa felt her hard go cold and horrified. The <em> Admiral Ushakov </em> should be only <em> one hundred </em>nautical miles from Azkaban at the time of the attack. Less than two hundred kilometres.</p><p>Narcissa jogged into the bridge, her robes whipping and flowing around her. “Captain, Captain, do we have a situation report from <em> anyone </em>ahead of us?”</p><p>“<em>Trying, </em>Madame Malfoy,” he shot her a brief look. The electronics were almost completely disabled, and only the satcom link to one of the temporary communications satellites they had managed to launch just for this mission was still active. Everything relying on local transmission—everything trying to punch through this magical field in any direction except straight up—was dead.</p><p>“Is there anything?” He demanded again, while Tonks followed her aunt inside.</p><p>“...Headquarters has managed to establish a link with a Tu-22M bomber from the 185th GvBAP, Sir!”</p><p>“Can we get the satcom data-link for the Prime Minister?”</p><p>“Trying now, Sir!”</p><p>One of the display screens in the copious communications gear aboard the amphibious command ship resolved into a fuzzy, almost washed out vision of static. But Narcissa could still see something, Tonks could still see something, that seemed impossible. “Where are they, is that <em> part of Britain?” </em> She hissed in horror, a looming horror of what she might have just done. The land was wiped bare, an immense expanse of hills and valleys marked by silt and sand and mud.</p><p>“No, Madame Malfoy, it’s…” The Captain looked at one of the data-readouts, he was listening to the crew of the bomber. There was a woman pilot, her voice calm but in that way you could tell her pulse was higher than it had ever been before. Narcissa could imagine the clammy skin, just from the tone of that voice. It was of a woman who had seen her own death pass before her, and by some feat of luck and courage, had recovered her bomber from a flat spin at an altitude of barely a hundred metres.</p><p>A woman who with her crew were seeing something unfathomable, completely impossible.</p><p>Something that was terrifying Tonks and Narcissa, too.</p><p>Land.</p><p>“...That’s the middle of the North Sea,” the ship’s Captain finally fitfully finished the sentence.</p><p>“Massive tsunami…” Narcissa could hear the broken, stressed words of the bomber pilot. They made her go pale, again. She remembered Luna last night. She remembered where her sister was.</p><p>“That’s enough, thank you!” Narcissa had the almost ridiculous presence of mind to utter, as she grabbed Tonks’ hand and half-dragged her niece with her back down from the bridge. “Luna, <em> Luna Lovegood!” </em></p><p>Luna was staring intently to the south.</p><p>“<em>LUNA LOVEGOOD?” </em></p><p>She turned, and had a smile on her face. “Madame Malfoy. Isn’t it marvelous? Magic sank it, and magic has raised it.”</p><p>“<em>Miss Lovegood, what in Brigantia’s name do you damned well mean!?” </em></p><p>“The muggle scientists call it Doggerland,” she said, unperturbed. “Don’t worry, it’s just what the Storegga took from us, that’s all, not the whole thing… The land of our ancestresses, Madame Malfoy.”</p><p>Tonks went as white as a sheet.</p><p>“Why hasn’t Draco left yet?” Luna abruptly asked urgently.</p><p>Narcissa cursed vilely under her breath as she had nearly never done before in her life. “Draco, my son, you are needed on the <em> Ushakov</em>!”</p><p>Her son froze in place, looking forward over the rail, his face a rictus of fear at the sky beyond, at what had just overtaken them. “What if she’s already gone, mother, what if the ship is already gone? I could apparate to a wreck underwater…”</p><p>“Luna knows, now for the sake of our family, GO!”</p><p>Larissa stepped up to Draco’s side and grabbed his hand. “I’ll go with you, Draco. Come on. Let’s go.”</p><p>Draco swore softly and raised his wand. With a crack, they disapparated together.</p><p>Narcissa looked to the south, in a fear and wonder that was entirely too common at that moment. In a war that blended magic and technology, magic had just reminded the world of its power, its unpredictability, its wonder.</p><p>But with her heart feeling like it was sinking to the deck, the ship upon which she stood pitching around wildly from the churning sea, all Narcissa could feel was fear for her elder sister’s life, somewhere in the heart of the maelstrom, with a tsunami coming on.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Some notes on the battle. </p><p>The first is that, of course, we should not expect that of the first wave of forty-two Tornadoes, that anything like the whole number was shot down. Only a small number would have been--though witches on ships certainly makes the attack far more punishing than it otherwise would be. Rather, somewhere more than five (since one of the escorting destroyers was lost) Tornadoes successfully executed attacks in the first wave. In fact, most of the second wave was likely comprised of Tornadoes from the first wave which had failed to line up for successful attack runs, but had enough fuel to reprise the attack. Unfortunately for the Morsmordre, most were subsequently lost to Bella's terrifying improvisation. </p><p>It was assumed here that magical enchantments to the missiles themselves, rather than the warheads, would render them vulnerable to interception and detection by Azkaban. So it was first necessary to destroy Azkaban, then the RPK-3s with their nuclear depth charges could be launched on the attack against the Chunnel. In the story, the attack plan goes through several iterations--that is normal.</p><p>The Storegga Slide was, of course, the final destruction of Doggerland, which was once the land bridge across the North Sea between Britain and the mainland. But, by the time it took place, Doggerland was already an island; so there is no reprise of a land bridge. This will be covered more in the next chapter, but, I was very interested in representing truly powerful magic, of ancient lineage--which Bellatrix here inadvertently unleashed. </p><p>The reader may wonder if a single bomb hit would be a serious matter for a ship of this size; however, a 2000lb (912kg) laser-guided bomb of the modern type is not a trivial matter. By the time of the second hit, the damage could be serious indeed, especially when she was required to continue steaming at high speed (30kts), which tends to fan the flames. In fact, almost no ship in the modern world would be able to remain combat effective after taking one such hit, as the Ushakov did here. </p><p>Yes, I use female pronouns to refer to ships. This is an old English nautical convention, and I am writing in English. So, that's the way it is.</p><p>You may wonder why Captain Klimov is so concerned about being broadside on to the wave, and why the amphibs acted with such alacrity to respond by turning their bows to the wave. However, imagine simply that, for example, a pencil is much longer than it is wide. If you press on it along its entire length with a constant force (the pressure of a wave), the force applied to the ship is much greater than if you press on the width of the bow (the point of the pencil) alone. This simple principle explains why it's necessary for a ship to keep her bows to the weather in a storm or when facing a tidal wave..</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0062"><h2>62. Doggerland</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>In honour of my American readers, a Thanksgiving chapter outside of the regular posting schedule. Yes, I plan to also get one on this Saturday anyway!</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Doggerland</b>
</p><p> </p><p>They had minutes. The wave had been on the horizon only a few minutes before; now it was pressing in closer and closer still. That was Larissa’s assessment as she appeared on the bridge of the <em> Admiral Ushakov </em>at Draco’s side. She had never see Bellatrix Black looking worse, even on the day they had cut off her arm. Hermione looked disconsolate and grim.</p><p>Klimov shook his head. “Well, reinforcements, and just in time to get fucked,” he muttered under his breath, so that only the wizards around him could hear, not his own men. Then he raised his voice and spoke with full confidence. “Councillors, the ship will not answer the helm. I need full port rudder. Immediately.”</p><p>Larissa watched the looming wave before them. <em> Two minutes, maybe three at most, </em> she thought. “There’s no time to get to the rudder to clear the jam. Draco…?” She turned to look urgently to him.</p><p>He closed his eyes for a moment and then took a breath. “You have to enchant trees for Quidditch, right? Well, link with me, you give the enchantment, I’ll cast a left-turning spell. Hermione, Aunt Bella, I’ll need your assistance, we’ll need every magical core we can in this.”</p><p>Hermione shook her head. “But what if we just keep turning to port and put our other broadside on?”</p><p>Draco sucked in his breath. “If we overcorrect, then, we cancel the spell, and let the jammed rudder carry us back to starboard. That’s it. That’s all we can do.”</p><p>Captain Klimov checked his chrono and glanced back at the wave. “No reason not to try, at this point,” he said very mildly.</p><p>Draco produced his wand. With a grin, Larissa went for her own. Hermione helped Bella to her feet, and together in the bridge of the <em> Ushakov, </em>the four of them faced the frothing mass of water coming in against them.</p><p>“Sir! We’ve secured all the sprung scuttles and hatches that we can find, and all the men we can contact are secured from the deck!” One officer came up to Klimov as they worked, sweat beading his brow.</p><p>Larissa completed her enchantment spell like she would, preparing a tree for quidditch. At first, it seemed like complete futility. The hull, the electronics, the computers, they resisted her. Then Bellatrix joined her, and with her weakened magical core, still directed herself at <em> Larissa, </em>with a single spell that seemed to crackle through her, and then to the ship. Larissa felt an uncomfortable tingling, arching from her head down to the deck, and a sense of lethargy that she had to fight with all of her force of will against. Her heart started skipping beats from the electrical energy, but she gritted her teeth, and forced herself on.</p><p>And then Draco whipped himself around to his left as he uttered the incantation, repeating commands like he might have during his Quidditch days. His body seemed to slow down, like the sheer magical energy required was slowing time for him down to mud. Larissa could feel him, leaning on Hermione and Bella and her strength.</p><p>Two Russian sailors were gripping the control wheels, swung hard to port, trying to force the ship around, but until then, it had been an empty gesture. More men were doubtless belowdecks, straining on the emergency steering gear, with a similar lack of effect.</p><p>And then the bow started to swing back toward the east, toward the port, toward the Motherland. It was a symbolic straining of the ship as she swung her head ‘round, back toward the city that had given her life. As she did, the frothing white water came on, and Larissa could hear some of the veteran sailors on the bridge curse, or cross themselves and invoke God. They could see, as she could now, that it was not one wave, but “three sisters”.</p><p>This strange and mythical truth of the sea, the unusual phenomenon which caused three massive waves to appear in short succession, was the cause of many ships lost at sea without a trace. And now, whatever terrible power of magic had been unleashed with the destruction of Azkaban, was giving the <em> Admiral Ushakov </em>‘Three Sisters’.</p><p>But their bow was coming around to port. Straining with her magic, Larissa could see the compass dial lazily spinning. She could see the old veteran Starshina with his fist clenched, hunched forward, squeezing the flesh of his hand white, like he was tensely watching a race or a wrestling match, wondering if his side would win—wondering if he would live or die, silently willing the ship’s bow to port, to race the coming of those three wicked sisters coming down on them.</p><p>Captain Klimov was precise, and scientific, until the end. “At least thirty-five metres,” he observed, measuring the height of the waves as they came in, off the angle of the bow and the position in the windows of the bridge.</p><p>They swung past zero. Draco waited.</p><p>Klimov stared hard out from the bridge of his ship. “Now,” he ordered simply.</p><p>Draco instantly commanded the spell to end.</p><p>The bow began now to swing back to starboard, back toward facing the wave directly… They were almost perfectly aligned when it struck.</p><p>Almost.</p><p>It was not like a bomb, but the subtle danger was almost worse. The surge of the sea frothed up around the bow, narrow and sharp her prow was. As the frothing water rose around the bow, she cut through it and the buoyancy of the bow increased the deeper the water got, thrusting the bow higher and higher, the deck now lurching below them, until the heights of the wave plunged over the deck.</p><p>Being slightly angled to port was perfect, because the damaged, jammed rudder was driving them to starboard, counterattacking the force in the wave. The sheer power of the wave consumed the forward part of the ship, until they could see nothing at all in front of them, the wave rising over the height of the bridge, raising the bow higher and higher even as it still overcame the ship. It slammed into the bridge windows, cracking them but not overcoming them, as sheets of water poured into the bridge-deck from the open wings. The bow had completely disappeared into the wave, as the foaming water churned aft across the deck, extinguishing much of the flames from the first of the bomb hits but spreading burning oil and debris across the frothing tide.</p><p>Then she crested the wave, and the bow plunged down on the other side with terrible speed. The screws came out of the water as the stern went up, and the Chief Engineer had to quickly clutch the shafts and then clutch them back on as they bit water again, a deft and desperate operation with a tens of thousands of kilowatts spinning the shafts and screws and seconds counting for everything as the ship heaved and surged around him.</p><p>The wave passed over them. Light shone down through the windows, spider-webbed with cracks. The water, carrying dirt and grease, drained from the bridge, where it had soaked their boots. Through the vastness of the waves of the North Sea, the tip of the prow thrust its way through the boiling sea.</p><p>“One,” the Starshina said with a breathless whisper.</p><p>But their bow was carrying away, too far to starboard. Draco cast his spell again—Larissa leaned into the electric thrum of the hull, her nerves and muscles aching in time to the aches she could feel in Bellatrix’s—Hermione arm in arm with a most improbable friend. Their magic forced thirty thousand metric tonnes to once again come about to port.</p><p>Captain Klimov grimaced, and Larissa followed his look, and saw some poor bastard, a seaman from some party that because of the damage and disruption, had not managed to get below. He had somehow survived the first wave. They could see him, a tiny figure of white on the deck that still ran with water running free and loose from the last wave, he was working his way toward the superstructure from forward, hand over hand on the rail.</p><p>The second wave caught them then, and flung the great ship high into the air before the water consumed her, and again, sent her down. The wave stormed across them to the height of the bridge again, with a terrible groaning roar through the hull, like a scream at the end of the world carrying all before it. So terrible and slow it rose, consuming the whole of the rail forward – the wave rose up, and that distant, lone white figure on the rail disappeared.</p><p>The waves slammed into the bridge, the water sprayed from each beam, a rush of foam went up and over. This time, alarms began to sound, as she hesitated, and shuddered. For a moment, Larissa wondered if the howl of the muggle klaxons was the last thing she’d hear.</p><p>But then, like a great dog, she shook herself and roared upright again. White water spilled off the <em>Ushakov</em>’s superstructure in torrents as the wave now on her stern helped pull her bow up.</p><p>“Two,” the Starshina said, the word carrying growing hope.</p><p>“Captain, we’ve lost the boilers.”</p><p>“Increase reactor power!” Klimov ordered immediately. That was the cause of the alarms, then—the second wave had been so high that sea water had plunged down the funnel and literally put the fires out in her boilers. Instantly, the control rods were brought up, and the power surged and flared in the reactor. Engineers, slammed against their handrails and consoles, would be frantically adjusting the operating parameters of the nuke as they were battered by the surging and bucking ship in the fight for their lives. The bruises and broken bones didn’t matter, as long as they kept the revolutions up on the screws.</p><p>Again, Draco commanded their bow to port.</p><p>And, in the corner of her eye, Larissa saw that the stanchions were bereft of that one lonely man. She could imagine his cries for help, and knew she would never hear them.</p><p>The third wave loomed and began to consume the bow. Guidewires and stanchions cracking and popping with flat metallic sounds, the hatches on the missile tubes flexing with concern—if they were lost, they might well take their final plunge—and then the whole bow disappearing below the roiling water. It was as they tore through the wave, and cleared the rest to the other side, that the bow plunged down, and then there was a sharp and terrible shudder that ran through the hull, as they were all thrown off their feet and dashed into consoles and walls and the floor. The water poured in, and now she lurched unsteadily, and like a hurt beast, struggled to rise.</p><p>“We’ve struck bottom!” Someone yelled.</p><p>“...In the Long Forties!?”</p><p>“Rise again, damnit,” Hermione cursed in hope and fear for the ship and their lives as she struggled to her feet, looking for Bella through the knee-deep water in the bridge.</p><p>And groaning and creaking, the bow, with a particularly kind of sucking noise deep in the steel, rose and shook loose once more from the furious sea.</p><p>Just like that, it was over. “Three, by God, three!” The Starshina exclaimed tightly. He pumped his fist. The frothing, churning sea was boiling all around them. She began to turn over to starboard, engines still driving. At the senior petty officer’s declaration, they briefly erupted into a sharp, triumphal cheer.</p><p>“All ahead slow,” Klimov ordered sharply, cutting off further celebration. He then reached for one of the emergency intercoms, vigorously turning the hand-crank on the side to give it power as he lifted up the mouth-piece. “Damage control central, Captain Klimov. We’ve cleared the waves. We touched bottom. Get a team forward to the bilge ahead of frame fifty to sound the hull.” Then he turned. “I want an assessment of all the radars to see which are repairable—this must be completed with the utmost speed,” he instructed the weapons officer, before speaking into the intercom again. “Get another team forward to make sure the hatches on the S-300 launchers are not jammed. You have fifteen minutes.”</p><p>Reports started to come in of the status of other ships in the squadron. Many had suffered heavy damage, but as their steering gear had not been jammed, they had been able to pull away from the waves, and then position themselves to ride it out as best as they could, and were mostly better off despite their smaller size—but one of the frigates was disabled, and drifting. Another was not answering radio calls, and the situation looked grim.</p><p>From witch to wizard to sailor to officer—to each Klimov looked, calm. “As long as this ship is above water, we will find every means in our power to fight. Sailors, to your posts.” Then he looked specifically to Larissa and Draco. “MinKol comrades, you saved us temporarily and I thank you for it, but the task is not finished. We are still circling, out of control, a sitting duck. I need the rudder un-jammed, or failing that, blown off completely, so that we can steer with engines.”</p><p>“Land,” Bella interjected, muttering, from where she had her wand raised, staring out at the horizon like a drunk.</p><p>Larissa turned to the distraction, and then Klimov did too, raising his binoculars.</p><p>
  <em>What? </em>
</p><p>It was Klimov who with a kind of matter-of-fact courage said the impossible first. “That land shouldn’t exist.”</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The minutes had passed with the taut terror of the impossible. First had come the terrible shockwave through the air. It was gentle enough, by the time it reached the <em>Inflexible, </em>that it did not cause damage. But it had still been impressive, and even moreso when the unending reports and alerts from land stations indicated an origin in the North Sea. The funhouse distortions—the <em>Fata Morgana—</em>that followed revealed strange magical energies and distant images of the nuclear blast.</p><p>Electronics had nearly failed, and in an arc around the eastern shore of Britain, and from all the shore stations further on, in Europe, they were receiving no communications. ‘Enemy’ communications seemed impacted, as well. The western shore stations were still getting through to them, and they had reception from the American squadrons, but the signal quality was impacted.</p><p>Blaise, of course, had his telecaster, and the ancient magic of the Minoans seemed to ride the tide of chaos without interruption. Captain Palliser came in from the bridge to the chart-room, in time to hear his commander mutter a name under his breath.</p><p>“Lestrange.”</p><p>“Forgive me, M’lord?”</p><p>“Bellatrix Lestrange. There is no wizard in the world who can match her for unpredictability,” Blaise mused with a shake of his head. “The Dark Lord is far more powerful in the Dark Arts, of course. But even a lesser strength of magic, properly applied in an unexpected direction—nobody anticipated this madness.”</p><p>“You know what it is?”</p><p>Blaise looked up. “Yes. They enchanted a nuclear weapon, and used it to destroy the fortress of Azkaban.” The ship creaked faintly under them, a little bit more intense than normal, and the two men exchanged a glance, both wondering if it was a distant echo of that fabulous power.</p><p>“I’ve heard reports of a tsunami from the fragmentary radio messages,” Palliser observed. “The power of the enchanted weapon must have been terrific.”</p><p>“There’s another aimed at the Chunnel which should be detonating as we speak, to eliminate any chance of reinforcements from the continent.” Blaise gestured to the telecaster, to indicate where he had gained his information, and then stepped over and poured himself a cup of tea.</p><p>Palliser took his own. “Well then, M’lord? It sounds like they have found a way to wound the beast.”</p><p>“They have,” Blaise shook his head softly, though he agreed; it was in wonder. “Azkaban was uniquely magical. There was some ancient power on that island, that’s why such a fortress was built there to begin with, and it possessed some kind of geomancy, the form concentrated the energy of the place where it was built. I don’t think this is entirely an enchanted nuclear weapon. But, I also know that one must strike while the iron is hot. Inform your men.”</p><p>“M’lord,” Palliser saluted and turned away.</p><p>Blaise went back to the telecaster. He inclined his wand, and it spun slightly, as he guzzled down his tea; one more cup, and with indecent haste, for he’d be in a fight for his life only bare minutes from now. “Your Grace,” he spoke into it, “the word is ‘Albemarle.’ I am at your service.”</p><p>In the midst of chaos and wild magical energy, of uncertainty and kinks in plans, all brought to fruition by an impossible event, Narcissa Malfoy seemed utterly composed, with ice-water in her veins, as she regarded Blaise Zabini through a wavering image above the telecaster. Men were speaking in tones of professional urgency behind her, in Russian. The image rocked from the sea conditions her ship was experiencing. She might as well have been at a garden party.</p><p>“Good. You’ll be getting more help than you expected,” Narcissa noted to him, flatly. “The coast of Mainland in the Shetlands is going to be hit with a tsunami with an expected runup of more than a hundred and fifty feet. Since we can’t evacuate all the troops upland in time anyway, we’ll take all we can and have them accompany the MinKol wizards. Stand by. I need you to go now.”</p><p>“Your Grace I was supposed to have fifteen minutes after I gave Albemarle.”</p><p>“We don’t have the time anymore. Fortune favours the Bold.”</p><p>Blaise tipped a salute at Narcissa. “You’ll have your fleet, Your Grace. Reinforce us. Now.”</p><p>Narcissa nodded once. “Underway.” She deactivated the telecaster.</p><p>Blaise tightly gripped his wand, and then stepped up to the bridge. At least, two of his targets were already coming up, summoned by a request from Captain Palliser, to meet with the Sea Lord. One of them walked into his first, sharp, <em>Avada Kedavra </em>and dropped dead on the spot.</p><p>The second man was stunned by the act, and fell back into a defensive posture; his <em>Protego </em>sharply flicked aside Blaise’s first <em>Sectumsempra </em>as the man, incredulous, cried out, “By God why, Lord Zabini?!”</p><p>Blaise had chosen Palliser as his flag officer for a reason. He had a cool head and quick wits, so when it started fifteen minutes early, he didn’t blink. He just picked up the handset for the tannoy. “All Hands, All Hands, now hear this. This is your Captain speaking. CIS wizards and troops are now arriving aboard. Greet them as your comrades, because we are hoisting the White Ensign, and His Majesty’s Ship <em>Inflexible </em>will obey the commands of Prime Minister Narcissa Malfoy’s Government. Anyone who resists this instruction should be shot.”</p><p>In the close quarters of the bridge, the bark of the rifle from a marine was unwelcome, but of course a man tried for the second loyalist wizard even so. A <em>Protego </em>sent the bullets skittering through the bridge; one man went down with a secondary wound from the ricochet.</p><p>But then Blaise lunged forward. He fought dirty, any Slytherin worth his salt would, and his mother had taught him a few things about quickly disabling an opponent. Fisticuffs were ‘undignified’ for a wizard, but they knocked the man in front of him back nonetheless, and then a quick stroke of his wand and a sharp “<em>Sectumsempra!” </em>finished the fight with a hideous set of wounds to his foe’s left shoulder.</p><p>All around them in the two taskgroups, MinKol wizards and witches who had drilled over and over again, memorising the images of these ships, their names, the natural essence of what they were, had prepared to apparate to them in the middle of the surging sea. The Goblin intermediaries that Narcissa had been using had even brought out samples of steel from the ships, the better to sample their essential nature and prepare for this reckless leap into the heart of the open sea.</p><p>One that was now made more difficult by the men who they carried with them. Many, pitched to the deck, were sick the moment they arrived. But they were motivated. They’d been told of the tsunami coming in against Mainland. They knew that their equipment would be destroyed, and at best, those who could not drive it to the heights of land to preserve it, would have to run there, and be hors d’combat with only light arms. These men were VDV. They were a carefully selected and rigorously trained elite of the Russian armed forces, who wanted to get to grips with their enemy and win the biggest strategy victory of the war. If any had any qualms about the dangerous and daring exploit, they forced them down, volunteered as a man, and threw themselves into the operation, reinforcing those men actually trained and prepared for it.</p><p>Collateral casualties? Certainly, there were some from both sides. But risks had to be accepted in war. And the good guys were quickly identified—they ripped the Morsmordre off their uniforms as fast as they could. The crack of small arms and grenades in the corridors of ships on the open sea echoed up to the bridge.</p><p>Within about four minutes, it was also over. A combat of that type was settled with ruthless decision. Blaise plunged down with the men, snapping spells and covering them, sparing nothing. He knew that every second of chaos held a bigger problem behind it—the American squadrons. If they chose to attack, his two carrier groups would be the first targets. The Russians were supposed to be coming up hard to support him, but that would take time.</p><p>Of course, if his men could sort themselves out, they could start preparing deck strikes now. If they launched first, they could take them. Around him, men rushed back to their stations—they were being ordered to their action stations to help bring an end to the fighting. <em> Allow no dissent. Allow no questioning. </em></p><p>But those same men came to attention, and saluted, even now. “We’re with you, M’lord!”</p><p>“We’ll follow you to hell, Sir!”</p><p>Not fear, not anymore. Respect.</p><p>Silent, and thoughtful, Blaise walked back to his bridge, satisfied. That was an emotion one could ride very far.</p><p>He reached the bridge, and in the evening’s fading late of a stormy spring North Atlantic day, flicked out his wand. In one gesture of thanks, and because breaking his word made no sense, he guaranteed his flagship sailed and fought under the White Ensign, as, by a certain kind of irony, she never had before. On the deck, before they were directed back to preparing the fighters, men started to sing. He turned to Palliser, knowing it would help morale in a still very uncertain moment, and smiled faintly. "Let them sing, Captain. Let them sing."</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. The perilous position of the "Admiral Ushakov" is based on the fate of the USS Memphis in a series of waves that remains mysterious to this very day. Here's a naval historical article on the event: https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/disasters-and-phenomena/tragedy-of-the-uss-memphis.html ; and a personal account of one of the officers aboard: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1918/july/wreck-u-s-s-memphis</p><p>2. "Three Sisters" waves are a sailors' tale, of a tightly spaced group of three rogue waves, which are devastating because a ship has little time to shake off the water load and recover from the first before being hit by the second, and then the third. They do, in fact, appear to be a real natural phenomenon, with modern science providing observations: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337506120_Three_Sisters_Measured_As_a_Triple_Rogue_Wave_Group and also mentioned here -- https://www.math.arizona.edu/~gabitov/teaching/101/math_485_585/Midterm_Reports/RogueWaves_Midterm.pdf</p><p>3. The name Albemarle in this operation of course invokes George Monck, the Commonwealth "General at Sea" ultimately responsible for the English Restoration.</p><p>4. The Long Forties are a large area forty fathoms deep in the north-central parts of the North Sea.</p><p>5. To be evocative of some of the conditions, here's a video of the Russian destroyer "Admiral Ushakov", the namesake of the battlecruiser in this story (which has since been decommissioned, and was originally named "Kirov") in heavy weather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CCWpuRY9rM</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0063"><h2>63. Going Home</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The destruction wrought on the enemy had been awful. The destruction wrought on all of civilisation along the North Sea by this terrible prodigy had been just as awful. Their foe’s casualties were heavy, their North Sea fleet had been destroyed, dozens of aeroplanes had either been shot down or destroyed on the ground by the tsunamis. Furthermore, the sheer staggering scale of what they had done was almost unfathomable. They had washed at least an entire division worth of enemy troops into the sea, it seemed. Still, they were debating whether or not to proceed with the invasion. If a great victory seemed an odd time to consider calling off a decisive strategic stroke, the realities of what had taken place did, legitimately, require some thought.</p><p>Aboard the <em>Mitrofan Moskalenko, </em>Narcissa sat in the command conference room. Satcom was fully back up and they were linked in with staff in Norway and in the CIS. In front of them, staff officers were filling in the details of what had been discerned. While the satellite network had been destroyed in the nuclear exchange, some of the missile tubes on the Project 941 SSBNs actually carried small reconnaissance and communications satellites to support targeting of nuclear weapons during the ‘broken-backed’ phase of nuclear war, and the reserve stocks on shore had been used to support this important offensive.</p><p>They showed the basic contours of a land irrevocably changed. The scientists allowed to speak, described the approximate contours of the shore representing those of circa 6,500 BCE. Before the Storegga Slide. <em>As magic has wrought, so magic has undone, </em>Narcissa thought idly of a world turned outside down. The Storegga Slide had been caused by a witch, the legend went. Now a witch of the same family, unleashing magic on the highest point of Doggerland, had brought it to the surface again, with all the hellish energy and strength of nuclear weapons, funnelled through enchantments used for the first time.</p><p>Bellatrix would be acquiring quite the reputation for that. But it remained quite true that with these events having come to pass, that quite simply, the waters off the coast of Britain were now unknown. An island of 34,000 sq. km. had surfaced in the middle of the North Sea. A substantial region of land had also surfaced, including the Well Bank, northerly of Norfolk. Several other, lesser islands had also appeared. The intersection between the two events had driven the “three sisters” tsunami—which fortunately was not as high as had been predicted, or else it might have caused the utter ruination of the east coast of Britain. As it was, the destruction, and fatalities, were heavy.</p><p>More to the point, all of their maps were wrong. The officers on the ship were hand drawing in new land based on the satellite images, in a state of mild incredulity. The debate was over whether or not to risk a landing, when the landing craft might get hung up on new sands, and thousands of men could be picked off, while their ships couldn’t get close enough to shore to land them.</p><p>Narcissa raised her tea and drank, as calmly and deliberately as she ever would. She was running out the clock, so to speak. The ongoing debate over whether or not to continue to carry out the invasion despite the loss of accurate maps and the risk of the landing force being hung up was something she intended to deal with shortly enough.</p><p>She just needed the evidence that there was no turning back.</p><p>At length, Tonks arrived with a letter, and she tensed as she took it. It was written in Gobbledegook, and a brief scan of the contents told her everything she needed to know. A great sense of peace and certainty washed over her. The deck of the ship below rolled with the fury of still churning seas, but it did not give her pause as she stood. “Mister President,” she addressed the Satcom feed’s image of the line from Astana, showing Nursultan Nazarbayev and several members of Stavka. “I have received important information from Britain.”</p><p>“Madame Prime Minister, by all means, inform us.”</p><p>Narcissa raised the letter. “Gentlemen, I have received confirmation from my allies that they have launched a rising in the city of London. Buckingham Palace and substantial parts of Whitehall are under their control, and they have parties fighting for control of the Tower, and several of the bridges across the Thames. To refuse to continue the invasion at this point would be to condemn them to defeat, and utter ruination.”</p><p>The Actual State Councillor for MinKol—Anton Vikhrov—looked sharply at her. “Madame Prime Minister, you are quite aware that we had already agreed the risk of the operation being uncovered was too great if we arranged for an uprising of the muggleborns in the United Kingdom.”</p><p>“Pursuant to the decisions already made by the Council of War,” Narcissa answered, “I did not distribute wands to the muggleborn population in detention.” She let that statement hang for a moment. “Since you would not permit me to do this, I arranged for my agents to distribute the wands to London’s Goblin population instead. They already had cells that were organised against the Ministry, and readily took to wands and distributed them among the general population. And they kept the secret, for indeed, the Dark Lord’s security services were expecting an attempt to arm the muggleborn population with wands, but they were not expecting the armament of the Goblin population. And so strategic surprise was obtained and we now stand on the cusp of absolute victory.”</p><p>She looked directly to the President of the CIS. The others’ opinions ultimately did not matter, and as for the muttering of wizards, horrified at the idea that one of their own had distributed wands to Goblins, she addressed the muggle, the wily man who had held this war effort together for so long. “Mister President, it is a plain fact that half-measures are the greatest enemy in War. In fact, the Goblins were long an oppressed nation, after their defeat in the last war, more than two hundred years ago, and were eager to revolt, as the Dark Lord’s regime had placed them in a position of absolute subjection. The utmost secrecy was required to accomplish this without the enemy finding out, and so I make no apologies for the failure to brief this body, or any other. I disobeyed no instruction, and acted by my prerogative as the Head of Government of my country, to arm a body within it, and encourage them to action, against our mutual foe.”</p><p>“What will you do, Madame Malfoy, when they turn those wands upon you?” One of the wizards in Norway asked, in accusing tones.</p><p>“Would that I had only such problems,” Narcissa answered serenely. “When we are still in a general war against the most powerful practitioner of the Dark Arts that the world has known. My ancestors fought in, and won, Goblin Wars. I will gladly risk another, as the price for placing two thousand wands into powerfully magical arms, ready and willing to use them, in the heart of the Dark Lord’s Capital. But, certainly, I have already taken measures to conciliate them, promising them a privileged place in finance, of this world of both muggle and magic that we have found ourselves in. I will be plain with you all—I despise that class of financiers and London capital, who sold their country to the Dark Lord for a pathetic mess of pottage! There is no way that we would see the tanks of our enemies on the Volga and in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, at the Red Cliffs of the Yangtze, or before Uluru in the heart of Australia, <em>as we did over these past years, and only by desperate actions, and millions slain, have thrown them back; </em>were it not for such a parcel of rogues in a nation as should debase and sell themselves for privilege and favour to a regime that held them to be animals, and enable them in every way to learn the ken of and make command over a modern war-machine! Goblinkind, who honourably acquitted themselves in many even contests of strength with wizarding-kind in Britain and other nations, have never once violated their trusted position in the handling of money, shall have the privilege of the City henceforth, and representation in the Lords and the Wizengamot. If they still choose to abuse the privilege of wands, then I shall make terrible war upon them, for I possess now an Army and Navy of veterans, with many wizards experienced in fighting, and when the sword hath built up a province, it may also quickly tear it down. However, that is all idle talk, for now, in this hour, we are allies. We have been wounded by the Dark Lord, and they have been wounded by the Dark Lord. That is enough. Mister President, though the risk of the invasion being undone by the great magic that has been wrought in the North Sea is real, the disruption to the enemy defences from this Goblin uprising is real, too. I say it is enough to accept one risk balanced with another, and with courage, cast the die. I will remind all of you who fear the nation of the Goblins in arms, to keep <em>well in mind </em>that to abandon the Goblins of London at this juncture would be to earn the enmity and hatred and mistrust of Goblins worldwide. It is not merely honour, but common sense too, to carry on the invasion.”</p><p>Narcissa sat back down. She had said everything she needed to. Out of the corner of her, she could see Tonks look at her with respect. <em>In fact, it was young Hermione who gave me the idea, </em>Narcissa mused. She looked up at the image of Nursultan Nazarbayev.</p><p>The President cleared his throat. “Fate and circumstance have left this decision to me. We will not have another opportunity to seize the industrial heartland of the enemy. The loss of four divisions is an acceptable risk when measured against the advantages we accrue from victory in this operation. I have made my decision. Continue the attack.”</p><p>Narcissa settled back faintly. She remained completely composed. Orders were transmitted, the satellite links went down. The revolutions of the screws underwater increased, and they turned to the southwest, toward the Moray Firth. They were carrying home the attack. There would be no time to relax; all of her work still depended on keeping the Americans out. After a moment, she rose and went to her map room; it was time to talk to Blaise again.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>For the moment, the Americans had not responded—perhaps, in fact, Blaise’s seizure of his own fleet had escaped unnoticed. The night closed in around them with a powerful, inky blackness. British and Russians on the same ship drank the same tea. In the immediate vicinity of the Taskgroup, the Slytherin wizard could make out the distant running lights of the <em>Invincible, </em>the oldest of her class, and the <em>Victorious, </em>one of the new and improved models laid down during the war. Their Kestrels were standing by to cover the taskgroup.</p><p>On the <em>Inflexible’</em>s deck, the bombed up Buccaneers and the Typhoons fitted with droptanks set with their engines idling. There were no recovery operations—both catapults had aeroplanes set at them, ready to launch and cycle through a full deck strike as fast as they could. Other smaller sets of distant lights marked the rest of the taskgroup, from the old <em>Belfast </em>and the ex-American California to the two Type-22 frigates which stood closest in to the <em>Inflexible, </em>their Sea Wolf ready to provide supplemental point defence to the big carrier.</p><p>The sea was rough from the disturbances to the east. <em>Bellatrix Black, the brilliant madwoman. </em>From time to time, growing up and hearing the stories of the past war, he had been derisive of her title as the Brightest Witch of Her Age. If she had been, she wouldn’t have been caught and sent to Azkaban, after all.</p><p>He was steadily revising that estimate of her capability back upwards. He’d have some competition as the most successful traitor in history.</p><p>The telecaster whirred. “Your Grace,” he addressed Narcissa.</p><p>“Lord Zabini,” she acknowledged. “The Northern Fleet is in position. The <em>Admiral Kuznetsov </em>is standing as a Stalking Horse south of Thule, and the <em>Admiral Gorshkov </em>is one hundred nautical miles northeast of Fugloy in the Faeroes.”</p><p>“The <em>Admiral Kornilov</em>?”</p><p>“One hundred miles due east of Lerwick on Shetland.”</p><p>“There’s only one Shetland island now, isn’t there?” Blaise looked down at his tea.</p><p>“Yes, there rather is. But we can deal with all the consequences of what’s been wrought, later. You are within short range radio comms of the Americans, and you’ve spoken with the Wizards in command there before, when they arrived to supplement your command. I’ve been sending messages to New York, but I have not received a reply yet. Will you attempt to reach out directly to the fleet commander yourself?”</p><p>“Of course, Your Grace. They may, of course, simply respond by triangulating our communications and attacking. I intend to order my strike groups airborne against this risk.”</p><p>“If you launch and you don’t attack while we continue to negotiate, you will risk being hideously vulnerable when you have to land the aeroplanes to refuel and rearm,” Narcissa frowned. “It will create an incentive to commit to the attack, if they take too long to decide.”</p><p>“In fact, I may be able to use it to my advantage. By your leave, Your Grace?”</p><p>“As you wish,” she acknowledged, and the image swirled away.</p><p>Blaise grabbed the handset for the intercom to the bridge. “Captain Palliser, you may begin to launch the strike. Taskgroup Four may commence as well.”</p><p>“M’lord. It’s my pleasure.”</p><p>Before Palliser signed off the line, Blaise continued: “And, link me through to the long-range radio on the American Talk Between Ships frequency.”</p><p>“Sir?” The formality was lost, and for a moment, Blaise didn’t care. “They’ll know our position.”</p><p>Blaise decided to allow the muggle offer the indulgence of an explanation. “We can still lose everything by fighting them. They don’t really want to be here fighting for the Dark Lord. I will give them a way out. We’ll take the risk, Captain.”</p><p>“Well then, Sir. Patching you through now.” There was a moment of silence on the line, though no more than a moment.</p><p>“Admiral Hollis, I am trying to raise Admiral Hollis. This is Lord Zabini…”</p><p>Instead of inventing extravagant titles, the Americans had just made wizards into Admirals of what remained of their once great Navy. In a somewhat calculated insult, the man was a mudblood, too, which had caused plenty of grit teeth and fake smiles when his fleet arrived at Lough Swilly those months before. Now, Blaise wondered if Narcissa had perhaps been scheming to this end all along. It would certainly be fitting.</p><p>In the silence and static finally came a voice, with a Midwest American accent. “Lord Zabini, Admiral Hollis here. My officers say that telemetry from both your taskgroups hasn’t been available for the past few hours. The reports out of Britain are … Wild, to say the least. Do you have any clarification for us?”</p><p>The roar of the jets taking off was howling in the background, one could easily hear it wash over the line even from a feed inside of the <em>Inflexible</em>’s chart-room. “Lord Zabini. You’re launching your flight wing,” Hollis added. His voice was clearly inflected with stress.</p><p>“I am,” Blaise acknowledged. “The reports from the North Sea are real, Admiral Hollis. An island corresponding to the Doggerbank has surfaced in the middle of the North Sea, after the destruction of Azkaban. A powerful tsunami caused extensive damage to the defences.”</p><p>“Thank you, Lord Zabini.” There was a pause. “Do you know the location of the enemy, then?”</p><p>“I do, though I wish that there should be no enemies at all; I have the positions of your taskforces, Admiral. So, I will put it to you plainly. I am in the Duchess Narcissa’s service now, and with me, both taskgroups of the Home Fleet. It’s five on two, and you’re the two, Admiral. I know you don’t want to be here, and neither does most of your government. If you monitor the open lines from Britain, you will hear that there is a major uprising in London. Our amphibious forces will be landing soon. The Dark Lord’s power is broken. MACUSA and America has nothing to fear from him now.”</p><p>That was a lie, of course. Voldemort still possessed enormous forces and reserves of strength in Europe and elsewhere. But it was a convenient lie, which could be believed within this moment. “Admiral, for the moment, there has been no attack on the allied forces by MACUSA. Nor is there any dishonour in retreating at odds of five to two. Our nations are not yet at war. Turn around, while time still remains for us to enjoy peace.”</p><p>An uncertain air hung over the waves of the North Atlantic.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The <em>Admiral Ushakov </em>was listing hard to starboard by this point. Her bow, with the damage concentrated aft, was high up in the air. The sonar dome was partly awash, so that only a few metres of the bow was still below water. Conversely, salt water was sloshing around the fantail to starboard, with her list. The fires were out, but the helicopter hangar had floated, and a quarter of the after superstructure was burned.</p><p>Hermione had found Draco, holding a sleeping Larissa propped up on a mattress dragged out of some abandoned berthing area, in anticipation of an order to abandon ship which had never come. They had doggedly fought on through the night, fighting not against an enemy, but to save the ship. Only the first step had been the rudder, which in the end, Hermione had suggested a <em>third </em>option for that she'd managed to implement with Larissa and Draco--an <em>immaterium </em>charm, so the water would just pass through it.</p><p>At the same time, the crew had worked themselves to the bone with the pumps and temporary repairs. A few sailors were standing, maybe twenty paces away down the deck, smoking. The little firefly pinpricks of their cigarettes flared and fell with each puff. Hermione didn’t feel the need to join them, and they looked hollowed out, empty with exhaustion, having doubtless spent forty-eight hours or more on their feet without a wink of sleep, part of it, in the midst of superhuman feats of damage control to keep the <em>Ushakov </em>from sleeping. That cigarette was the only mercy or pleasure they must have had in days. She stepped past them, trying not to trouble them, and presented a thermos to Draco. “Come on, hot tea.”</p><p>“Thank you, ‘Mione.” He looked up for a moment, his face lit with the pain and uncertainty of what he had just been through. “Larissa works herself too hard. It’s very difficult to keep up.”</p><p>“Yeah, I know,” Hermione smiled wryly, and dropped down next to Draco, bracing herself against part of the superstructure, and pouring out tin cups filled with tea for both of them. “She really hurt herself channelling Bella’s electric magic, didn’t she?”</p><p>“She did. I’m not sure <em>at all </em>how it works, Aunt Bella… Mother never even really explained this to me,” Draco shrugged glumly. “She needs a mediwitch, but for the moment, the ship’s Doctor said she seems fine. We decided not to risk apparating her, though. More application of magic might hurt worse than just a good night’s sleep, out here on the open deck.” Before letting Larissa drift off, Draco had fitted her with a life preserver.</p><p>“Just in case we have to go. Well, I’ve got some good news there,” Hermione smiled faintly.</p><p>“Yeah?” Draco didn’t look up, from where he was gazing at Larissa’s sleeping face.</p><p>“Yeah. We just finished dewatering Engine Room Two. The bulkhead’s holding. The turbines are still working, even though they were underwater for a while, so for the moment…”</p><p>“Do you need some help trying to dewater the steering gear?”</p><p>“I admit, it would be good, but you can see, she’s starting to come up already.” Hermione gestured, and Draco followed her gaze, to where the deck was starting to poke back up from the choppy sea as the pumps continued to gain on the flooding.</p><p>“Alright.” He began to drink his tea faster. “It’s funny to think we could all apparate to shore, leave these men to fight for the ship on their own. Really, you and Aunt Bella could have fled earlier.”</p><p>“We never would have,” Hermione shrugged. “I couldn’t have imagined leaving Captain Klimov and his men to die.”</p><p>“No, and Larissa would never let me leave now. But I would have, once. And that’s all changed.”</p><p>Hermione smiled and looked out over the dark chop. “Well, you know you’re a better man for it, Draco. One I’m proud to call my friend.”</p><p>“Thank you, ‘Mione.” They were both silent for a little while.</p><p>Then they saw Bellatrix picking her way down the deck, looking ridiculous with her greatcoat having been draped over her dressing robe, corset over her uniform, hair making her look for all the world like a fuzzy rat thanks to the massive spray of salt-water she’d taken—though Hermione, admittedly, was probably just as bad.</p><p>Klimov was with her, the two of them making their way aft, both drinking tea, and a knot of sailors with SCBA gear following behind. He hadn’t slept in days, Hermione imagined, so the caffeine was a matter of life and death as much as anything else.</p><p>“Colonel Granger,” he nodded. “We’re going to make our attempt to dewater the steering gear, now.”</p><p>“Do we have a minute to finish our tea, Captain?”</p><p>“Yes,” he agreed—a few of the man also drank, some others pulled out cigarettes and passed around a lighter. “We’re talking more water forward, the bow is starting to trim down again; which is not bad for keeping our forward progress, we’re still at ten knots. But the pumps have been losing ground in the tank bottoms.” The ship’s hull had been dished in at several points forward, from impacting the newly risen bottom of the North Sea in the midst of the tsunami. But, the damage from the bombs aft had been much more serious initially. The longer they were at sea, the longer the damaged seams had a chance to work open in the rough waves, the more likely that was to change. Klimov clearly wanted the situation brought under control aft, in anticipation of the possibility that they might be down by the head later in the day.</p><p>They’d had to turn to face refracted waves a few times early on, and stopped several times to make emergency repairs. So, they were still about twelve hours out of Stavanger. A few marginal air defence capabilities had been restored, but once it was clear that they were flooding forward as well as aft, Captain Klimov had bowed to the inevitable and started to head for safe harbour.</p><p>“The General’s nephew, isn’t he?” Klimov asked her abruptly, at barely more than a whisper, gesturing to Draco where he was now engaged in conversation with Bellatrix a few paces away.</p><p>“Yes,” Hermione nodded and spoke hoarsely. If he had been going to say anything else, it didn’t matter, as Bellatrix turned back to her.</p><p>“Hermione, we should be good now.” Her eyes still had the manic energy, even as the rest of her was more and more haggard and exhausted from the events of the past days. “Let’s finish this, and get home.”</p><p>“Home’s west for us,” she said, feeling stilted as she added “General,” with a smile; she had desperately wanted to say <em>Bella, </em>but she was standing in front of Klimov and a bunch of others.</p><p>Bellatrix laughed. “Come now. Home’s wherever the boat doesn’t sink.” Her statement made the men grin, and Hermione smiled at the irrepressible spirit.</p><p><em>No, Bella, </em> she thought fondly— <em>home is wherever the hell you are next. </em></p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The sun pierced the sky over the Moray Firth. Narcissa used her wand to magnify the scene. Eight massive Project 1232.2 <em>Zubr</em>-class hovercraft were leading the storm across the sands which the rising of the North Sea bed had revealed, and the tsunamis had then cheerfully carved up and redistributed, thousands of years of shoreline change in hours. They had been moved to the Baltic to concentrate them for this operation, with six <em>Aist</em>-class LCACs as well and some smaller ones. This morning, they had been called to charge directly across the sea from Norway at 70kts. They were the first wave, and their objective was to simply get ashore as quickly as possible, carrying two companies of MBTs, a company of APCs, and two battalions of infantry.</p><p>Waiting ashore for them was the VDV paratroop division which had been detailed to conduct conventional desant from the heavy jet transport airlift assets. The 7<sup>th</sup> Guards Mountain Air Assault Division had put the first allied boots down on British soil. They had landed on the flat, open ground by Lossiemouth AB and Elgin, where Narcissa could make out tsunami debris across the runway.</p><p>Now, wizards and witches on the hovercraft engaged, laying down a line of <em>Bombarda Maxima </em>attacks on the heights beyond, and then turning to shield the hovercraft, which easily made it ashore. The landing proceeded apace, now with a VDV Air Assault Division and what was essentially a Regiment of Naval Infantry have gained the shore. The defenders were firing artillery, but they had pulled back into the heights of land, probably in response to the tsunami, and the open beaches east of Lossiemouth were free and clear for the hovercraft to land.</p><p>Narcissa wondered if, considering the bulk of the defenders were from units raised by the Scottish Nationalist government, they were also consciously trying to avoid a fight over Culloden, for fear of the morale and propaganda influence. Even the wizarding world knew about that battle, though mostly because Scotch wizards couldn’t stop complaining about it.</p><p>As the <em>Mitrofan Moskalenko </em>waited out in the Moray Firth, the hovercraft completed landing the first wave, and then fell back. They travelled more slowly at that point, sounding the sands for positions which were deep enough to get the conventional landing craft in close. The divers were already surveying and marking routes.</p><p>And, onboard the heavier landing ships, the crews of the tanks were fitting their fording gear. It was not necessary for them to be landed directly on shore—only to be brought close enough that their fording gear and the bottom conditions (no soft mud, for one) would let them finish the job themselves. Each step was synchronised, like the steps in a spell, and Narcissa appreciated it for being clever and inventive, to be sure.</p><p>But there was a kind of confidence in the back of her head, too, about how this had just shown the world what the true power of magic was. All of these contrivances were muggle forces trying to work their way around the consequences of magic. The witches and wizards supporting them were giving them enough time to figure out what that outcome would be. But it was necessary because, in a single day, as Atlantis had sunk below the waves, so had Doggerland risen up. <em>Or, indeed, as Doggerland had sunk beneath the waves once itself. </em></p><p>The Free British, Russian and Norwegian forces involved in this operation collectively were here on the backs of wonders. And Narcissa clearly saw her path forward, in just what her sister had wrought. <em>After years of petty tricks and magic bent to the service of a police station, did you wake up, Britain, and comprehend what power we sorcerous breed are? </em></p><p>Tonks stepped up to her side on the deck. “It won’t be long now until we go forward.”</p><p>“Go home, you mean, Tonks?”</p><p>“Go home,” Tonks agreed. She looked hard up at the cliffs, flecked with smoke and flashes of light from the bombardment, and the roiling, snapping sound of the bombardment that reached them from across the waves. “Hogwarts is, what, about a hundred miles to the southwest, aunt?”</p><p>“About that,” Narcissa agreed. The reminder made her see Lucius’ face in the mountains flecked with fire, and she quietly shook her head. <em>I will do your house proud, Lucius, </em>she thought quietly, and turned away to face her niece. “Thinking of Remus?”</p><p>“Aren’t you thinking of Lucius?”</p><p>Narcissa sniffed faintly, but nodded. “I am going to bury him… With the bones of his enemies.” She spun back around, then, and the loudspeakers on the deck, called out in Russian:</p><p>“<em>Land the Landing Force, Land the Landing Force!” </em>as the klaxons began to blare.</p><p>Home.</p><p>And with it, another campaign for them to fight.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. LCAC -- Landing Craft Air Cushion. </p><p>2. Bulkhead -- the internal watertight walls built to a similar strength as the hull of the ship, for retaining water and "subdividing" the hull into different watertight sections. For context, for example, the "watertight doors" on the Titanic were doors in bulkheads.</p><p>3. Goblins, of course, once had their own rulers and governments, but were subjugated after the Goblin Wars, ending in the 18th century, and Voldemort's regime, even during the main books, began to oppress them and prompted some to flee his power. They had many justified resentments.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0064"><h2>64. The (somewhat) Happy Return</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><b>The (</b> <b>somewhat</b> <b>) Happy Return</b></p><p> </p><p>By the time the <em> Admiral Ushakov </em>reached Stavanger, she had been shipping almost five thousand tonnes of water from the damage forward and aft. They had successfully dewatered the steering gear and un-jammed her rudder (after undoing the immaterium spell upon it), but the list had crept back up to twelve degrees. She had only a half-metre of freeboard amidship aft when she reached port.</p><p>By noon, she lay off Saltnesfeltet, with offshore support vessels standing to each side, with their pumping capacity helping her own. Torrents of water seemed to continuously come up over the sides. An hour later, a dedicated pump-ship came along her stern and was tied fast. By fourteen hundred hours, she was shipping only four thousand tonnes of water, and teams of divers had begun to apply underwater setting concrete to the buckled plates forward.</p><p>At this point, a launch came up from Stavanger, and Bellatrix, Hermione, Draco and Larissa were able to go ashore. Rocking gently in the launch, with the white spray along its sides, Bellatrix pulled her greatcoat tighter and leaned into Hermione. Hermione kept her eyes fixed on the battlecruiser, watching her slowly rise out of the water, to live and fight again.</p><p>Another hour later, they were in a commandeered former hotel by the airport, now used as officer’s billets for the Russian Aviation Regiments stationed there. Hermione and Bellatrix were given separate rooms, of course; but as the General’s liaison officer, Hermione was quartered with her, and it was a shameless minute later to slip into Bella’s quarters instead. Bella, with a fresh change of clothes available, had mostly stripped out of her own.</p><p>Hermione followed her, too exhausted to explain her intent; but they both knew they had no energy for sex. Instead, they just collapsed together, under the layers of blankets on the bed. They were heavy and relaxing and delightful. With the two together, the cold and wet were gone. It was warm, they were tangled together, they had destroyed Azkaban, they had landed in Britain, the fleet had defected; they had done it. Hermione fell asleep without another thought.</p><p>The next day, they boarded an IL-76 carrying reinforcements to Inverness Dalcross. In the night, the Scottish nationalist troops had fallen back into the mountains to the southeast, toward Aberdeen, and the airport had been opened for resupply operations. Unlike Lossiemouth and Kinloss, the runway hadn’t been damaged by the tsunamis. The rapidity of the enemy’s retreat was shown in the fact that two civil BAe-146s had been captured intact on the taxiway, and were now undergoing servicing by the Russian aviation technicians, for employment in the airlift. The tsunami had inundated Dalcross, but not high enough to lift those machines off their gear.</p><p>There was a UAZ-469 waiting for them, which carried the four down the A96 highway as far as Allanfearn, where tsunami damage forced a detour inland. In Inverness, the energy of the tsunami had dissipated by the time it hit the railway embankment, and there was only limited flooding beyond it. Narcissa had established her Government in the Inverness railway station, at least, the Victorian parts of it that looked presentable for the purpose.</p><p>When they got out of the UAZ, and Bellatrix in her British General’s uniform stepped out, there was a cheer. She looked in confusion to Hermione, who quickly saw that it was mostly a group of pensioners, who stood beyond the security perimeter, waving little Union Jacks they had likely been keeping secreted away for the past six years. Like as not none of them knew who Bellatrix was; they just saw her old style British Army uniform and could identify that she was a General officer.</p><p>“People like being free,” Hermione remarked, shaking the crinkles from her own Russian greatcoat. “Come on.” Here, the Union Jack flew above the Russian flag; they were truly home. The flags of the Nordic countries, the other allies involved in the broad operation, hung in a dainty assemblage alongside.</p><p>Then they stepped inside. The station was so freshly occupied for its purpose as the headquarters of a Government that they were still moving the baggage tags off the counters and British Rail placards off the wall—something the government had not gotten around to eliminating in the intervening years. They walked through to what had been the Royal Highland Hotel, and up to the fourth floor, in the tower adjoining the railway station. That was where Narcissa had her office, now. Though there was a staff, they were quite ineffective at preventing Bella from getting through to see her sister.</p><p>“Bellatrix,” Narcissa greeted. Hermione saw that General Diaz was standing next to her high-backed office chair.</p><p>“General Black,” Diaz added.</p><p>“Cissy, General,” Bella acknowledged, and waving off the staff trying to follow her, wandered around the table. She could see the map. Hermione joined her. “I take it that the General’s presence means I should be preparing to take command of my wing of the Army?”</p><p>“Yes,” Narcissa acknowledged. “All of the beach-works were destroyed in the tsunami, so they fell back quickly into the mountains southeast of Inverness. The Russian divisions are pushing on Aberdeen, and as your troops are offloaded, you will be taking the western coast, as we discussed.”</p><p>“Anything else to be planned?” Bella looked over the map, with Hermione at her side. “The main route of advance is on Edinburgh against the government, right?”</p><p>“Well, we’ll want to go to the west of the Firth of Forth. This government might easily choose to escape into Glasgow and fight there instead; strong support from the large Scottish nationalist population in the city, and extensive urban industrial works to slow the fighting to a crawl,” Narcissa answered crisply.</p><p>“Mmmn. Through Stirling and Falkirk, then?”</p><p>“Yes. There’d be no point, even with amphibious support, in trying to assault across the Firth of Forth except for surprise, and again, I just think they’d retreat to Glasgow.”</p><p>“I could take troops by Loch Ness to Fort William and down the west coast, Cissy.”</p><p>“Rough going in the mountains south of Fort William,” she replied. “It’s not much better down the A9, but you have both the road and the railway, and you’ll converge with the Aberdeen push at Perth.”</p><p>“All right. I can see it. Other than the fact that it doesn’t give us a chance at a coup de main against Glasgow before they’ve fortified it, it <em>is </em>the better route. Hmm. What about Hogwarts, Cissy?”</p><p>Hermione jolted. Of course, she hadn’t really been thinking about it, but the enemy could hardly defend it, having fallen back to cover Aberdeen, and the Lowlands. In fact, with their troops on the east coast having been caught in the tsunami, they likely hardly had enough personnel to properly screen Hogwarts. So who knew what was going on there…</p><p>“If you want to go, I won’t stop you; but you know it will have to be an entirely magical detail, since, as far as I know, the wards are still intact,” Narcissa leaned back thoughtfully for a moment. “With General Diaz here to coordinate affairs, I suppose it is a detail we need cleaning up. We won’t know the condition of the student body until you arrive.”</p><p>“Or Hogsmeade, or anything at all, really,” Bellatrix shrugged. “All right then. We’ll do it. Well, what about the staff?”</p><p>“Take them prisoner if possible,” Narcissa answered neutrally, and turned back to the map.</p><p>Bellatrix grinned.</p><p>“I <em>meant that, </em>Bella.”</p><p>The eldest Black sister rolled her eyes and looked to Diaz. “Surely…”</p><p>“I’m afraid, General, she has the right of it.”</p><p>She shot a look at her lover. "And I know <em>you'd </em>be no help. Very well, if we catch any prisoners, Hermione, you'll be the one to take them back to Inverness."</p><p>Narcissa didn’t look up. “I don’t care what you do with your subordinates, Bella. But I am trying to work. Take a MinKol detachment with you, and if the children need to be evacuated, then bring them back to Inverness as well.”</p><p>With a wry look, Bellatrix tipped a salute to her youngest sister. For all the age difference, there was really no doubt about how was in charge. She turned and breezed back out. “Come on, ‘Mione, you can tell people that the first time you went back to Hogwarts, you <em> killed everyone there.</em>”</p><p>“Bellatrix.” Narcissa’s voice echoed after her, Not Amused At All. “I would warn you that there is a <em>very short period of time </em>until there are <em>reporters </em>around to take down everything you say.”</p><p>Hermione tried to avoid laughing at the grimace that twisted Bella’s face. She failed.</p><p>“<em>You! </em>Not helping!” Cissy shouted after them. “And take Draco and Larissa and Luna with you, I don’t want you going alone!”</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hogsmeade. They apparated in, with about fifty witches and wizards, mostly MinKol but about fifteen from the Black Guards, and four Scandinavians. It would be enough to overwhelm any opposition unless the civilian magical population in Hogsmeade chose to fight—or the Slytherin students. The rush of groups some distance clear of the station came with a moment of tension. For the first time since she had fled Britain, now, back on British soil, Hermione would fight a battle entirely magically, without muggle support. It was sometimes said that Sgurr a'Choire Ghlais was the location of Hogsmeade, but in fact it was merely the location of an approximate physical entrance to the entire Hogwarts preserve, which was subtly shifted to hide much of it from the Muggle population. Perhaps now, that would no longer be needed… But it gave the enemy a proper line of defences, just as it had given them defences for Hogwarts so long ago.</p><p>Assuming there would be a battle. As they marched down the track to Hogsmeade, through the outer layers of wards over the entire magical area, closer to Hogwarts, there was little sign of a defence. The Hogwarts Express <em>was </em>at Hogsmeade, with steam up. But the Goblin driver just stepped out and raised his hands. “Glad you made it before we went <em>sawth</em>!” he declared.</p><p>Bellatrix laughed and posted a guard, but then stepped down from the station. It was quiet, and people were milling around Hogsmeade, looking uncertain. Hermione knew the feeling. Many of them would hesitate, and wonder if their liberation would be permanent or only fleeting, trying to make up their minds on whether or not to make a potentially fatal demonstration of loyalty to their liberations, if they did not linger for long.</p><p>Honeydukes was still there. Hermione supposed even Slytherins in Voldemort’s regime needed candy. Madame Puddifoot’s was there as well, and a few surprised patrons came out to stare. There was silence, because the wizarding world left after six years of Voldemort’s rule had perhaps become too comfortable with it. But there was no resistance. Perhaps the madness of Voldemort’s reign had demoralised them.</p><p>There were precious few young people, Hermione realised a moment later. Perhaps the lack of resistance was for another reason entirely; those with the inclination to fight had gone to fight, and many of those left, knew someone who had been killed in Voldemort’s wars.</p><p>One way or another, Bellatrix faced the same problem that Voldemort had all of those years before; powerful wards meant they would only get closer from Hogsmeade, by walking, or rather, marching. They were all so used to it, that as they entered the town, most of them fell into a cadence; and it was Bellatrix alone, with her sauntering swagger, who stood out, who came here as part of the old regime, who was now part of the new. The destroyer six years ago; the oppressor, two years ago, the liberator, today; that was Bellatrix, when it came to Hogsmeade. Hermione forced herself to break the cadence and carried up to Bellatrix’s side, marching a half step to the left and behind as a junior officer, though; that she couldn’t help. “Does it remind you of anything?”</p><p>“Yes, all of it ghastly,” Bella bit back. “School was boring, except when I was getting one over on someone.” She paused, then, and frowned for a moment, then looked sharply up a rude sort of track that descended into Hogsmeade.</p><p>Hermione followed her gaze. A band of goblins was coming down, from the hamlets they lived in deeper within the magical preserve. They were bearing old swords and muskets, and a few of them had half-pikes. The muskets were almost certainly enchanted, knowing how Goblins did things, and therefore highly illegal and immensely dangerous, but doubtless for precisely that reason hidden since the last Goblin war. “Uhh…”</p><p>“Oh right, we’ve been too bloody busy for anyone to tell you what Cissy did!” Bella started cackling. “It’s going to bite us in the ass, I’m sure of it; but she <em>did it, </em>and right now, it’s marvelous. She <em>rearmed the Goblins</em>! But these ones don’t have wands; she sent them all to London.”</p><p>Hermione opened and closed her mouth a few times as the goblins approached. They even had a drum, beating out a steady rat-tat-tat a marching beat. Now, the residents of Hogsmeade, which had a long memory of the past Goblin wars, began to flee inside, with a few fingering their wands as they did.</p><p>Bella’s eyes narrowed and she snapped a look back toward where Larissa and Draco had brought up another detachment. “Seize Ollivander’s, at once!” She ordered, pointing down High Street toward the branch of Ollivander’s shop.</p><p>Larissa turned back, barked orders, and pointed a gloved finger in the direction of the shop. They took off at a dog trot.</p><p>There was a brief sound of spells being slung inside as the MinKol personnel swift took control. The remaining residents of Hogsmeade took cover inside of their homes and businesses, now. The Goblins reached High Street, and the leader drew himself up—and offered a polite salute. Hermione felt giddy. <em>I never realised that Narcissa had such depths… Oh, but I should have! </em></p><p>“<em>General the Lady Bellatrix Black</em>” The Goblin commander presented. “Nifiger Rittogott.”</p><p>Bellatrix, with a wicked grin, nodded, and stuck the tip of her wand in her mouth to accentuate said same grin. “Mister Rittogott, it is indeed I. As a gesture of eternal friendship between the House of Black and Goblin kind…”</p><p><em>And Bellatrix is smart too, </em>Hermione thought at the way she immediately phrased it, beaming with pride as she stepped up to Bella’s left.</p><p>“...I want to offer you a gift.” Bellatrix waved them left down High Street as well, and the force of two hundred Goblins or so followed the troops there, who were now assuming positions to secure the street, and cover the secondary storeys of the houses against possible attack.</p><p>Jarrick Ollivander, one of the old man’s grand-nephews, was being marched out in bonds at wand-point by two MinKol wizards. When he saw the Company of Goblins assembling in front of Ollivander’s with a mixture of wonder and envy and awe, he was capable of putting two and two together.</p><p>“<em>My God, Black, </em>it’s <em>against the law, and common sense too! </em>If they have wands, it will be the end of peace in Britain! And all of this because you were dissatisfied being second? Because your kid sister wants to rule the whole roost with the help of a Russian Army!? You’d steal the whole stock of our store!?”</p><p>With a sneer of contempt, Bellatrix lunged forward and dug her wand into Jarrick’s neck, until he breathed sharp and low, with eyes wide in fear. “Law?” She cackled. “<em>Merlin</em>, Jarrick, but you Ollivanders have always been half mad, and even Bellatrix Black can tell you that. Let me put the matter to you plain, like the old poem says: <em> No gospel can guide it, No law can decide it, In Church or State, till the sword – Hath sanctified it. </em>Well we have just sanctified it, Sir! Go on, Hermione, help Mister Rittogott arm his people.”</p><p>Hermione tipped her lover a salute, and stepped through the door, past Jarrick, who was now bathed in cold sweat. Inside, there were boxes and boxes of wands. She walked around behind the counter, thinking, for the moment, that with an armed body, she had simply walked into a civilian store in her native Britain, and started seizing the wares of the shopkeeper and distributing them for free, in violation of the law, to a band of Goblins.</p><p>She shrugged, and started opening the boxes and sliding them across the counter to Goblin, after Goblin, after Goblin, while humming the rest of the song that Bellatrix had quoted:</p><p> </p><p>“<em>Lay by your pleading,</em></p><p>
  <em>Law lies a bleeding;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Burn all your studies down, and</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Throw away your reading.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Small pow'r the word has,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And can afford us</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Not half so much privilege as</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The sword does.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>It fosters your masters,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It plaisters disasters,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It makes the servants quickly greater</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Than their masters.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>It venters, it enters,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It seeks and it centers,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It makes a'prentice free in spite</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Of his indentures.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>It talks of small things,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>But it sets up all things;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>This masters money, though money</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Masters all things.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>It is not season</em>
</p><p>
  <em>To talk of reason,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Nor call it loyalty, when the sword</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Will have it treason.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>It conquers the crown, too,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The grave and the gown, too,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>First it sets up a presbyter, and</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Then it pulls him down too.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>This subtle disaster</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Turns bonnet to beaver;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Down goes a bishop, sirs, and up</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Starts a weaver.</em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>This makes a layman</em>
</p><p>
  <em>To preach and to pray, man;</em>
</p><p>
  <em>And makes a lord of him that</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Was but a drayman….”</em>
</p><p> </p><p>She had become one of the Siloviki in Russia. Now she returned to Britain, and she was a Swordswoman. The Goblins, for what it was worth, found nothing at all wrong with singing the bloody-minded song as they took their free wands, the first that their kind had known in centuries.</p><p>Hermione had come back to Hogsmeade in triumph, and instead of being greeted as a liberator, people fled into their homes and looked through the blinds nervously. They hid, and the woman she loved held one at wand-point and threatened him while she had her troops steal all of the wares of his shop—war, real war, had come to Hogsmeade.</p><p>Goblins saw her as a liberator, though. They thanked her as they took the wands.</p><p>When it was done, Hermione quietly looked around the empty shop, and decided that was enough. She stepped out briskly. The sun was still high in the sky. Rottigott was standing with Bellatrix, Draco and Larissa, conferring over a set of maps spread across some tables that had been used to display wares at a shop. Larissa was eating some fudge with a devilish grin as she leaned over the map, leaving Draco with a somewhat awkward expression on his face, and leaving Hermione to wonder if one of her best friends had literally just sacked Honeydukes with a body of troops.</p><p>What did you do in that circumstance?</p><p>Hermione walked up to Larissa. <em>Damn them all. Voldemort would have never reached power without them, anyway. </em>“Can I have some?”</p><p>“Of course, ‘mione. It’s damned good fudge.” With a grin, Larissa handed over a brick.</p><p>In the madcap world of war, it was best to choose a principle and stick to it, and not care much for the rest. The Goblins were free. Good enough.</p><p>Hermione ate the fudge.</p><p>Bellatrix had a very big grin as she reached over to a steal a piece, and for a moment, their eyes met.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>After they regrouped, with most of the Goblins with a small group of MinKol officers to direct them serving as the garrison of Hogsmeade, the main body—mostly wizards and witches with some Goblins who had more experience and weapons to use other than wands, like the enchanted muskets—prepared to march down the road to Hogwarts. Larissa had volunteered her and Draco to command the garrison at Hogsmeade—Hermione realised it was to keep Draco safe, and probably at Narcissa’s instruction, but she respected the way Larissa handled it, and Draco seemed proud of the responsibility.</p><p>Now, it would be up to Bellatrix and Hermione to lead the troops taking the school itself. Hermione stepped up to her side. “Were you worried about Draco?”</p><p>“Not in isolation, pet,” Bella answered softly, seeing as they were standing far enough away from the others. “But he has many bad memories of this place. I do, too, but mine are older.”</p><p>“Bad memories? He was always..” Hermione fell silent as Bella moved quickly to speak over her. She didn’t mind, she could see from the intensity in the woman’s eyes how important it was for her.</p><p>“Profoundly unhappy, no matter how in control he seemed at the time. Worse for me. It was here, after all, I nearly brought my family down with scandal.”</p><p>“Fair.” Hermione took a breath. She wanted a cigarette, as the anxiety peaked. They would be walking through the place where Harry died. But of course, she’d managed to shake the habit, so she didn’t have a pack, and off they went, advancing toward the outer gates.</p><p>There was a small group in Auror uniforms, black cloaks and robes and jackets with the green flash of the Morsmordre, waiting for them, in defensive positions behind the walls. Bella magnified the scene with her wand quickly. “Hermione, take the Goblins forward with their muskets. I’ll organise covering them with shields.”</p><p>Hermione nodded, and jogged over to Rittogott. “Mister Rittogott, if you’d form up your musketeers in the lead? MinKol will provide cover.”</p><p>“We don’t like being left out as cannon-fodder for wizards, Colonel,” he eyed her back warily.</p><p>“I’ll be accompanying you. You <em>will </em>have cover.”</p><p>“So be it then—company, muskets forward!”</p><p>The Goblins swung out in order down the road, with Hermione walking, her wand out, in a measured pace, upright. By the standards of modern warfare, even as a witch, this felt mildly suicidal. The Aurors immediately saw them coming. There was a moment’s hesitation, they were not expecting a small company of Goblins to be involved in the assault from what they knew by the time they had retreated from Hogsmeade.</p><p>The spells they started slinging at the force of Goblins a moment later, were scattered to the four winds by the combined power of fifty wizards working <em> Protego </em>simultaneously.</p><p>“Present!” Rittogott commanded, raising the wand he had obtained. The Goblins, still marching forward, presented their muskets at the shoulder.</p><p>One Auror issued an order. Hermione had a bad feeling about the way they shifted...</p><p>“Fire!”</p><p>Instead of musket balls, bright fat balls of magical energy, doing all kinds of things, turning into floods of water, exploding, undermining the walls, dumping dirt out of the thin air—all of them happened at once, tearing through the wall, and the gate, and the Aurors.</p><p>“<em>Merlin!</em>” Hermione exclaimed. She should have known. But her fear about what the Morsmordre Aurors intended was true, too. Two of the Aurors still had presence of mind and firm ground. They unleashed <em>Avada Kedavra </em>on the column, knowing it couldn’t be shielded, and two Goblins dropped promptly dead.</p><p>Hermione had not spent so long a soldier to be caught completely off-guard. She blew them back with a quickly slung <em> Bombarda Maxima. </em>The MinKol wizards and Bellatrix now quickly came in from the right flank, descending with them to the ruins of the gate. Symbolically, they crossed over it, and into the boundaries of the Hogwarts School of Magic. A few of the MinKol officers made to detain the surviving Morsmordre Aurors before they were executed by bayonet thrusts of the Goblins, or something else like that, in rough field justice. Relations between Wizardingkind and Goblinkind were poor enough to expect that anywhere, now that the Goblins were fighting openly.</p><p>They carried on, toward the viaduct. It stood, grand in stone, leading toward the main entrance courtyard of the castle, and there, for the first time in six years, she was back at Hogwarts, she could see the school she had never been able to graduate from. She’d spent her childhood, her entire life, loving knowledge. Hogwarts would never be her Alma Mater, her first school. It had been the first she had attended, but she’d never graduated. Never finished. Would never have that completion mark to show her family, never have that sense of normalcy.</p><p>No, when she finally showed her parents what she’d accomplished with her life—if she ever found them, if they were still alive—her first diploma would be from a school whose full name in English was the ‘The Combined Academies Order of Lenin Order of the October Revolution Red Banner Order of Suvorov of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation – Military Educational and Scientific Center of the Russian Ground Forces.’</p><p>She turned to one of the MinKol officers. “Do you have a smoke?”</p><p>“Of course, Councillor.” He extended her a belomor and a light.</p><p>Hermione took it up and took a long drag, the familiar old hit of the nicotine flooding into her lungs. She stared long and hard at Hogwarts, and was seized with a particular kind of hate for all the abuse and all of the pureblood idiocy which had led up to the war and in the end, to never having a normal school experience, never graduating, and never having a normal childhood. “Well, you failed,” she spit out at the silent walls. “Dirty mudblood got a degree after all, even if it wasn’t the one she wanted, and now she’s back,” she whispered in hoarse anger, staring at the school.</p><p>“I thought I had gotten you to quit,” Bellatrix remarked as she stepped up. “Hmm. It’s a bit of a problem, don’t you think? They’ve probably rigged the bridge with charges. But, their forces on this side have already been defeated, and it seems stupid for them to not just blow it right now.”</p><p>“Umbridge is a first class idiot, Bellatrix, and of course she’s trying to catch us on the bridge,” Hermione snapped.</p><p>“Something wrong, Hermione?”</p><p>“Yes.” Hermione glared at Bella, and remembered, suddenly, just how intensely Bellatrix had believed in the pureblood ideology for so long. “Your fucking pureblood ideology ruined any chance at a childhood I had.”</p><p>Bellatrix winced like she had been slapped, and Hermione immediately remonstrated with herself; Bella had come to check up on her on a genuine matter of importance, since smoking would kill her sooner or later. But maybe the wince wasn’t a bad thing.</p><p>“Just working through it, Bella,” she murmured softly, and looked back at the school with another drag on the belomor. “Yeah. Just working through it.” Actually, the more she thought about it, the more she was guilty about something else entirely, that she was feeling angrier at the loss of her own educational attainment and normalcy than about the fact that her childhood best friend was probably buried in a shallow and unmarked grave somewhere on the grounds—if he had been that lucky.</p><p>And Luna stepped up, and saluted indifferently. “General, Colonel, there’s someone to see you…”</p><p>Hermione jerked around. Evening had been getting on, and as the light faded from Hogwarts, she hadn’t really noticed it, staying, with her eyes fixed on the school as the troops moved and took up positions around them. Standing just behind Luna was Nearly Headless Nick.</p><p>“Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, at your service, General… Why, are you Lady Bellatrix Black? I do recall you in your Slytherin days… Hermione Granger? I have not seen you in a very long time, and … My my, what dress is that?”</p><p>“Russian Ministry of Witchcraft,” Hermione answered, and held up a hand to discourage Bellatrix from speaking. “Nearly-Headless Nick.”</p><p>“Hmmf. Well, I haven’t had much to do, since they discontinued sorting! You’ve come back, and brought an Army of Russian wizards with you?”</p><p>Through her anger and sadness, Hermione now grinned. “Yes, I damned well have.” There was something about interacting with poor old Nick that cheered her up immensely, and made her think of the happy times at school, instead of the sad.</p><p>“...But who’s turned their coat, then?” He glanced between the two in obvious confusion—he <em>was </em>a ghost, and how much of the modern world he always remembered was debatable.</p><p>“I have,” Bellatrix finally volunteered through gritted teeth. “We’re here to liberate the school.”</p><p>“You know! You always were such a firebrand, caring nothing for convention! I must say, sometimes I felt the Sorting Hat had misplaced you…”</p><p>“A Black, <em>not be a Slytherin? You might as well shoot me there and then!” </em>Bellatrix exclaimed.</p><p>“Well, there was Sirius,” Nick answered defensively. He'd always had a talent to put his foot in his mouth, even when alive.</p><p>Both Hermione and Bellatrix fell silent, and it was a very awkward silence indeed, before Nearly-Headless Nick made a slight bow. “At any rate. Ladies. Since the true Gryffindors are on your side, I wanted to let you know they have rigged charges to the bridge.”</p><p>Hermione nodded and turned through the darkness to look at the viaduct again. “We figured, Nick.”</p><p>“I may have watched them brewing in the Potions classroom, and know what they’re made of, so that you can counter them…” His sideways head disconcertingly grinned.</p><p>Both women turned to look with close interest at the ghost.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0065"><h2>65. Hogwarts</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Hogwarts</b>
</p><p> </p><p>In the gathering gloom, the two women looked across the length of the viaduct, hanging in the air over the veritable canyon separating them from Hogwarts castle proper. It would be impressive and difficult to assault in any condition. Knowing that it was rigged with magical charges, and defended by supporters of the Dark Lord, rendered it an immediate and lethal risk to approach. Bellatrix looked from the former Gryffindor house ghost to Hermione, and Hermione reflexively swallowed, and smiled tightly. “You remember what happened to the covered bridge, don’t you?”</p><p>“I do,” Bella acknowledged.</p><p>“So, Nick, what’s the ingredients?” Hermione flipped out her note-pad and grabbed a pen from one of the pockets of her fatigues, quickly taking down the list. … And one item quickly caught her eye. “Erumpent Horn. Bellatrix, can you reverse the tracing spell?”</p><p>“Yes,” the older witch leaned closer. “So, we find where they are. How do we get close enough to do anything about them, then? That concoction… Should be stable until it’s magically detonated. But there may be wards to magically detonate them, anti-tampering wards where they’re placed.”</p><p>“They’re almost certainly placed along the sides of the bridge. Flying?” Hermione suggested. “Of course, we haven’t any brooms… We could seize them from the population of Hogsmeade, though.” Hermione felt a particular coldness coming over her. She had, over the course of this war, slowly felt her sense of propriety slipping away, and now, having just liberated the contents of an Ollivander’s for the sake of the war effort, she was having difficulty justifying <em>not </em>going ahead and also just seizing property. They needed to win, they needed to take Hogwarts without collateral damage.</p><p>“No need,” Bella murmured. She looked around for a moment, and then dropped down to the ground, and began to hum out in Cumbric: “Epidii, swift wind, carry my message far to the magic I have touched,” she directed, and completed her spell with the tip of her wand just lightly brushing the ground, a skilled feat to avoid burying it, or missing entirely.</p><p>For a moment, the whole ground around them softly glowed, and then there was a distant rattling, from the direction of the Quidditch pitch. Hermione looked down at Bellatrix, who remained kneeling. “That was magic by divine invocation.”</p><p>“Yes, it was, pet,” Bella answered, smirking, in Cumbric. “Well spotted.” Always with the sarcasm…</p><p>Hermione rolled her eyes. “Bella, come on, you know that <em>nobody does that anymore…</em>”</p><p>“Except Larissa, in calling down the path to Ararat, and dedicating herself to Haldi. Dumblefuck’s collection of morons would <em>never </em>teach these things, but before Christendom, before the statute… Don’t you understand that the written history of that world has been hopelessly sanitised, of our historical world? The myths are real, all of them. The Gods are real, and yes, they are weak, but here in the Highlands,” she grinned, “a witch of my old family blood, whose ancestors worshipped before their altars at the High Days for a thousand generations, can certainly call down a few surprises.”</p><p>There was an eerie black green glow in the air as Bellatrix rose, and abruptly, deposited around her—Hermione had to throw up a weak shield to avoiding being hit by a few—a great mass of training and racing brooms from the lockers by the Quidditch Pitch came toppling down around her. Most of them were the old loaners. “What the <em>hell</em>? That was black magic.” Of course, it had also just solved their flying problem.</p><p>“It certainly was,” Bellatrix grinned all the harder. “Enchanted brooms are magically empowered artefacts. A <em>Dark witch </em>can imprint her own magic on magic she has wrought, for her own future use.”</p><p>Hermione felt herself go cold. <em>If you can manipulate the magic of an enchanted broom from afar, because you manipulated its magic in the past, could you use dark magic to control </em><em><b>me?</b></em></p><p>Her expression must have been much too blatant to hide. She was looking at Bellatrix, Bella was looking at her. An absolutely pained expression dripped across Bella’s face, with her eyes going wide and frantic. “No… <em>no…</em>” she mouthed, whispering. “<em>Never.</em>”</p><p>The younger witch drew in a breath, forced herself to keep calm. She looked at the real fear, the real shame in Bella’s face. In her love’s face. The woman she’d already agreed to have a relationship with, to be the mother of her daughter, to…</p><p>“Please don’t leave me,” Bella whispered with a bit lip, and it very nearly made Hermione cry to hear. “I promise you, I…”</p><p>“Bella, <em>could you </em>manipulate me with the scar?”</p><p>Bellatrix closed her eyes. Nodded, jerkily. “I could. The principles behind the dark magic which lets me summon a magical artefact I’ve interacted with are like the principles behind…”</p><p>“The Dark Mark,” Hermione murmured in horror.</p><p>“Yes.” Bellatrix shook her head in the affirmative in a single convulsive gesture, and then turned away. “Yes. Like the Dark Mark. You don’t think I would have let myself be branded without properly understanding the power going into it? Just as someone with the Dark Mark can resist its compulsions, you could resist me if I called you like that. You’re not a <em>broom </em>Hermione, you’re a <em>woman, </em>a <em>witch. </em>One of the most powerful witches alive. You are not suborned and subjected to my magical whims.”</p><p>“But you can assert your power over me through the scar.”</p><p>“Yes, I could.”</p><p>Trembling, Hermione shot a brief look toward Hogwarts, memories flashing through her. “Then why didn’t you during the final battle at Hogwarts? You could have tried to take me out of the fight.”</p><p>Bellatrix turned and smiled wryly, darkly, sheepishly. “I wanted to beat the ‘little mudblood’ fairly, Hermione. What kind of pureblood Dark Witch would I be if I needed to use such a mark, put into you in your moment of weakness, to bring you down?”</p><p>“You have a twisted sense of honour, but I suppose it was wrong of me to have ever assumed that you had none at all,” she was shaking her head, wondering how they had gotten to this point. She was cold, she was chilled to the bone, but… “Bellatrix, should I cut my arm off too? When this is done? Just so I can be sure that there’s no compulsion between the two of us? For the sake of my own sanity, a quick blow, just like with you, the replacement could be ready in minutes. Let no inequality come between us, Bellatrix. I’ll be your wife, but only as your equal. If you can use the scar to control me, then I ask, for the sake of our love, take my arm.”</p><p>Bellatrix was crying, damn it all, standing alone on a grassy knoll near the viaduct, with the brooms around them. The other wizards and witches were in position, eating Spetsnaz rations. They were, mercifully, being ignored. They needed it.</p><p>Bellatrix dropped to her knees in front of Hermione.</p><p>To spare Bella the shame of anyone seeing that, she quickly brought a concealment charm into being around them. “You’re not going to talk me out of it, Bella,” Hermione said, weakly, but confidently too. She was afraid of the prospect of cutting her arm off, but it seemed like the only true course—Cut the Gordion Knot, slice the baby in two, there was no way to be sure she was really in love except to cut her arm off, right? But the truth and freedom mattered to her so passionately that Hermione <em>had </em>to know for sure, and if that meant half of her left arm or even all of it, then so be it, she wanted to be <em>sure. </em></p><p>And Bella was on her knees in front of her, crying. “I don’t want to see you ruined like I myself am ruined, Hermione. Gods damn it, damn it all. What have I done to you? What I have done to <em>deserve </em>you?”</p><p>“Existed, apparently,” Hermione answered with a smile through the tears that she, too, was now crying.</p><p>“Existed, apparently, she says,” Bellatrix muttered. “That’s where we are. Existing. Hah. Hah! Alright, please, whatever, Gods have mercy, Hermione, this is not your’s to bear. I just don’t want you to hurt yourself and… Give me a chance to remove it, Hermione? This should be my burden to bear alone. Please give me a chance to remove it?” On her knees, her hands on Hermione’s hips, sobbing, like Bellatrix had never really sobbed before, her body, her smaller body, shaking in front of Hermione, from the black gloves on her hands down to the olive uniform skirt which draped around her black boots, the unbuttoned coat splayed wide around her, in imitation of robes—there, sobbing, in abject shame.</p><p>“If … There would be …” Hermione closed her eyes. No, she didn’t want to cut her arm off. Was Bellatrix really influencing her? Wasn’t this proof that she wasn’t? She was a ruined mess in front of Hermione, absolutely miserable at the prospect, absolutely ashamed. Didn’t it matter, and didn’t love involve trust? Hermione reached down—and hauled Bella to her feet. Kissed her.</p><p>Those lips, cool in the spring night’s air of the Scottish Highlands. Plump, soft, everything she could want. Embraced her close, two warm bodies in the cool night. Their lips parted for a moment, and tongues brushed together. Bella’s eyes, somewhere between dark and grey, expressive despite the black-and-white shades of colour, widened. Her tongue thrust, like she couldn’t believe it was real again, and Hermione caught it a bit in her teeth, her own eyes alight, playing for a moment, before their lips parted. “Alright,” she whispered. “If you can find a way to remove it before we’re married, then, I won’t have it cut off. But, I don’t want to be married to you, unless I am your equal. That also includes kneeling to me, Bella. There’s never a need to do that.”</p><p>Bellatrix sniffed, and laughed softly, composing herself enough to reach up and wipe off her tears. “Alright, then. I’ll… I’ll find a way. It may even be on the other side of the viaduct.”</p><p>“It might be,” Hermione agreed. It was certainly a copious library, by any measure. “Let’s make sure we capture it intact, then. The troops should have finished with dinner by now. We’ll get a list of those used to riding brooms, and prepare to get them out. You’ll organise the use of concealment charms with the others?”</p><p>“Certainly.”</p><p>“Alright. Then I’ll defuse the charges myself.” Funny how that muggle word clearly conveyed the intend, even though it would be magical ward-breaking. Funny, too, that Bellatrix had already changed so much in these years of war that the pureblood actually knew exactly what she meant by it, as well. Hermione rather liked that.</p><p>“Maybe going back to school is worth it after all,” Bella managed a grin at least. She reached up, brushed a gloved hand across Hermione’s cheek so very lightly—an erotic shiver shot down the younger woman’s spine, remembering all the places that leather gloves on Bella’s hands had been—and then she turned away, and fully composed again, began to bark orders. It was good and dark, there was no point in waiting, it was time to take Hogwarts.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione had <em>never </em>been a good broom-rider. Bellatrix, conversely, had been a Chaser for the Slytherin Quidditch Team. Yet, it was Hermione who ended up advancing along the bridge, while Bellatrix directed the operation from the opposite side, thanks to the reality of being in command of the affair.</p><p>So Hermione clutched to her broom, feeling the distinctly <em>dark </em>magic floating around her (that was, admittedly, another reason for Bellatrix to have stayed behind, as did most of the Koldovstoretsy who had graduated from the Black Court—the best concealment magics were usually <em>dark</em>) as she worked to break the triggering wards around this charge.</p><p>If they succeeded in getting them all without being detected—presumably, even Umbridge was smart enough to trigger the remainder if they were detected—then it would be a simple rush-capture of the viaduct. If they didn’t… Well, the detonations if any of the wards were unsuccessfully broken would not only alert Umbridge and her defenders, but also probably kill those who were out on their brooms trying to disarm the others, Hermione herself included.</p><p>Fun. Her knees stayed very firmly against the old broom—and it was <em>old, </em>considering it was something that <em>Bellatrix </em>had touched with her magic, one of the beaten up old training brooms that had been there <em>forever—</em>and she delicately worked with her wand. Each sequence had to be perfect, and correctly ordered to the response of the wards. Breaking through them was no easy challenge.</p><p>In fact, it was far more dangerous than either of them had really thought about before beginning this course of action, but in retrospect, that was to be expected. Danger had become like an old friend to them all. They had gotten inured to it. The girl who had once been afraid of breaking school rules now floated a hundred metres in the air next to a magical explosive ready to collapse tonnes of rock onto her, that was protected by detonating wards that she was now systematically picking through by careful experimentation and direction.</p><p>And she was more worried about her relationship than about the job in front of her, even if she didn’t—couldn’t--dare let her thoughts stray. Not even in the slightest…</p><p>...A bit harder to keep that true than she really liked.</p><p>Then the last of the wards dropped away, and she reached up, plucked the charge, and dropped it, letting it flutter away, down into the valley below. They were almost down, and it would not take much more effort for them to successfully clear the bridge for the attack. Who knew what they’d find on the other side, but find it, they would…</p><p>The luck ran out for one of the other curse-breakers. The next column down, the <em>last </em>column, just as Hermione was swinging it toward it. One second, she was musing, while she whispered along on her broom, trying to avoid detection. The next second, the magical charges blasted directly in front of her with an enormous concussive effect of blue and green energy.</p><p>She whipped her wand into a <em>Protego </em>that saved her life—for the moment. The concussive blast wave in the air blanked her—she felt herself black out—and opened her mouth to screen. “BELL--” before lost to darkness, she spun off the broom, falling into the chasm below.</p><p>All so simple. All so sudden.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix was exchanging words with Luna, standing on the knoll, her emotions recovered. Well, not really recovered, but patched together enough that she was perfectly focused on the battle, with maybe a little bit of distraction daydreaming about what she would do to Umbridge when she got a-hold of the moronic pink bitch.</p><p>Then the charges detonated on the last of the columns. It dropped only two spans of the viaduct, those two which were the furthest from them. They dropped heavy and slow with a terrible roar, the flash of light showing the witches and wizards on brooms, shattered and smashed away by the hammer of the concussive shock in the air.</p><p>For only a split second, Bella froze. Then she spun away from Luna, grabbed one of the remaining brooms she had summoned, and leapt on it. Bellatrix had fought in the air on brooms several times, she had learned how to enchant them for the Russian version of the sport, simply as a hobby and a curiosity. She had once, before her arranged marriage, been a Chaser, sure. Sure with her commands, she flung herself out across the chasm instantly. <em>Hermione…!</em></p><p>This was a situation which required split-second thoughts. It required decisiveness, the kind which admitted no hesitation. You either executed what you intended, you sought to obtain your objective, without any maudlin sentimentalism at all. You put everything together and you <em>did it, </em>as plain as day. Or you let everything be wasted.</p><p>You let your lover die.</p><p>Bellatrix shoved the broom down, gaining speed, in a powered dive, it would outrace someone accelerating under the influence of gravity, without difficulty. <em>How do I find her before she hits the ground? </em></p><p>Perhaps it was the fact that they had just been discussing it that it was so close to mind. She had just sworn she would never use the scar to control Hermione. She had just said she had never influenced it with her magic. That was true, at the time she’d said as much to Hermione. But before even the survival of their relationship, came her girlfriend’s life. So within an hour of making those promises, and with no time for hesitation—and Bellatrix was decisive enough to admit no such hesitation, to act as was needful, and damn the consequences—she reached out through the bond, and used a creation of dark magic and a scar carved in hate to find her, to locate exactly where Hermione was as she fell in the darkness through the air, and with the grace of her Quidditch days, pluck her out of the air, and cast an <em>Arresto Momentum </em>to slow the both of them to a halt, while a <em>Protego </em>followed as they reached the ground, to fend off still falling chunks of rubble.</p><p>Bellatrix dropped to her knees atop her unconscious girlfriend, then. She breathed sharp and hard, again, and again, as the adrenaline began to fade, and her thoughts processed with horror the fact that she had just done exactly what she had promised not to, and used the link between them. She had been all prepared to show her responsibility and her convince Hermione that it was nothing—that it would never be acted upon. But her love’s life came first.</p><p>As the full weight of what she had just done hit her, she leaned over as far as she could to be sick. Vomiting in the grass felt like only the beginning of that weight, but in fact, Hermione was unconscious and needed medical care, and the fear of losing her ascended like a vice around her heart. A minute later, Bella dragged herself up, and secured Hermione to her with a few quick rope spells, so they could ride a heavily laden broom together, back to the knoll, while there, Luna had already taken stock of the situation, and sent a team forward along the bridge, while others went to recover the wounded, and shields and <em>Bombarda </em>casts were flung back and forth across the gap.</p><p>Bella handed Hermione off to a mediwitch, shaking, pale, trying to take stock of the situation. She had no time to fully process what she had just done, she needed to get control over the battle, and find a way to storm Hogwarts despite the gap in the bridge. It wasn’t the entire bridge, it was an approach problem, and… She started to issue orders, getting her teams forward across the bridge, while flipping her own spells across the gap, now with explosions echoing against the warded walls of Hogwarts, dislodged stone and damaged crenallations sometimes crumbling down.</p><p>There was a strange horror in it all. She wanted to be at Hermione’s side. Everything had happened in minutes—it was only minutes ago that Hermione was fine—and she wanted to know how she was doing. She wanted to help heal her lover.</p><p>Instead, she was leading an effort to storm the gap, against all hazards. They were in main battle, just as she had been at her Lord’s side when they had taken Hogwarts, and now, she fought to take it back. <em>Turncoat, turncoat, you fucking turncoat. </em></p><p>Then there was a commotion off to the left. It was Luna, returning with several of the MinKol wizards. They were arriving – on trees that they had felled, and enchanted to float. Bellatrix looked from the trees to the gap in the bridge, and flashed a quick hand sign to Luna, which she signed back in the affirmative. They swung out toward the bridge.</p><p>“Come on!” Bellatrix pitched her voice with a quick wandless charm—the limits of her power—while raising her wand in the air and casting <em>Lumos, </em>a light to rally to, to make her a target—and charging to the viaduct. “Forward, forward!”</p><p>It was a blinding flash of intensity. Everyone was rushing. Shields being cast, spells being flung, explosions detonating off the flanks of the bridge. Rippling booms through the air, lights flashing, spells slung, fires exploding on the deck of the bridge as they tried to reach Luna and her trees.</p><p>Men were falling and dying, and Goblins, advancing and then forming up on the sides of the bridge, firing at the enemy, were being caught by curses and killed or blown from the viaduct as their enchanted muskets were blasting back, blowing holes in the outer-courtyard walls of Hogwarts, burying or freezing defending wizards. The assault was in chaos, it was fucked, completely fucked, from the moment the bridge had been blown.</p><p>And then Bellatrix was standing there, in the middle of the bridge, snapping her wand to knock aside incoming curses. “Come with me!” She screamed, her voice tearing through the cold night’s air as the wind blew through the heights above the valley below. “Come with me, and take this castle!”</p><p>Luna dropped the first of the trees into place across the gap, bouncing and flexing and settling as a temporary bridge. Then another, another, another… Bellatrix rushed forward, stumbling, grabbing onto the branches poking out and working her way around them, as her spells tore through the enemies now trying to stop them, alternating between wicked hits of the like of <em>Sectumsempra </em>and shields which served to keep the trees from being set on fire by the increasing desperately efforts of the defenders.</p><p>The blonde Ravenclaw soon had the black witch at her side, on the other side of the gap, with a tight knot of Koldovstoretsy around them. They flung waves of power into the enemy, while rushing behind them came more wizards and a platoon of Goblins, forming up. The order to fire in Gobbledegook echoed out, and the first sharp volley blasted through the ragged form of the defenders, their shields already overwhelmed by spells</p><p>Human and Goblin side by side, they rushed the last distance, into the courtyard of the castle, through rubble and smoke and flame and ice. Bellatrix dashed at their head, and she came up short.</p><p>It was a small band of Slytherin students, under their house banner. There was Umbridge, in her noxious pink, her hands raised in surrender. There were the terrified students, the wounded students, the <em>dead </em>students, as young as the age of thirteen—third year students. <em>Third year students. </em></p><p>Bellatrix screamed in rage and frustration.</p><p>“<em>I SURRENDER!</em>” Umbridge wailed.</p><p>“Gods but I don't fucking know why you bother to!” Bellatrix exclaimed. <em>Fine, let Cissy deal with her. But this better be good. </em></p><p>Trembling with rage, intensity, hunger, uncertainty, fear, shame, adrenaline, Bellatrix stood there, hand on her wand, looking around the school. Finally, tearing her eyes away, coat and hair alike flapping in the wind, she looked to Luna. “Get Hermione inside. There will be more potions in the Hospital Wing. I’ll lead the sweep of the castle. Personally.”</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0066"><h2>66. Remus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Remus</b>
</p><p> </p><p>There was a dim kind of horror at the memory. Amycus Carrow, disappearing, his body wreathed in white, turning to a black silhouette, disappearing entirely. Disappearing, into the tentacle of darkness oozing out of the door to the place-beyond-the-stars. To a place worse than Hell. Hermione twisted and turned, and wondered what kind of monster she had been, to condemn Amycus to the destruction of his very soul. Just like with a Dementor, there would be no going back from that, and what had she done, anyway, to treat it as such a cavalier act?</p><p>She felt frozen in the horror of the memory. After all, it was something she had thought was awful and evil before. Something that had helped her love Bellatrix to begin with. But to save the world, she had done it herself—to a man mostly guilty of the same deeds as her lover, at the same time, but…</p><p>Hermione stirred inside and shifted. Blinking, she felt a very familiar sense of deja vu at the fact that she was definitely, absolutely waking up inside of Hogwarts’ Hospital Wing. It gave her some kind of confidence that she was not, in fact, dead. The second one was that she was rather sure that in her heaven or hell she wouldn’t be seeing Councillor Tikhonov, the healer attached to the MinKol unit, mixing up potions at Hogwarts. Her head still felt awful. Her <em>heart </em>felt awful, waking up from that miserable dream, with the image of the cave at the bottom of Ararat firm-fixed into her mind and refusing to go away.</p><p>Tikhonov saw her and quickly stepped over, and handed her a hot, bubbling brew, propping her up to drink. It cleared the fuzzy disorientation the moment it hit her stomach, and she looked up urgently. “What…?”</p><p>“Councillor, you suffered a traumatic brain injury from the concussive force of the detonation. But it’s now well on the mend. However, you must absolutely rest.”</p><p><em>I last remember… Nothing? Being on a broom and… An explosion. How did I not die? </em>“How did I not die?”</p><p>“I understand that the General saved you personally.”</p><p>...<em>Bellatrix. “Thank you,” </em>Hermione mouthed softly, and watched as he stepped away to other patients. She felt herself growing drowsy from the potion again, and feared the reimposition of the dream. Of the reminder of just how fungible her morality had become. But her mind fixed on another nasty image as she drifted off. Bellatrix, reminding her that she had Obliviated from her parents their entire memories of her life.</p><p><em>Oh, God… </em>The misery in her fading consciousness washed over her in waves.</p><p>Then felt cool black leather pushing into one of her hands. Gripping it. Holding it. She still passed out, but the relief washed over her, and reminded her that she was still a person. That she was still loved. That her choices had brought that love to her, and saved it, and kept Her alive, and that was the choice that she had made.</p><p>Bella was here, with her, at her bedside. Holding Hermione’s hand in her own gloved one. Filled with silly behaviours and pretensions and hangups. Wild, manic, impulsive. Beautiful. Deadly in combat. A genius who had invented a new class of magic. A mother.</p><p>Absolutely her’s.</p><p>The dream faded away into a melange of other images. Kitezh, Astana, even Sebastopol, for all the fear when it happened, now seemed happy and reassuring as a memory. A memory of coming together with the woman she loved. Hermione slept, and peacefully, too, as long as Bellatrix sat there, quietly holding her hand. In the ward at Hogwarts, where she had at least returned, after six bloody, brutal years.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix sat in the Headmaster’s office. She had been here countless times, mostly during her own Hogwarts years, as Dumbledore would gravely lecture her about how she was wasting her potential with the latest pranks, the latest fight, the latest scandal. She racked up as many demerits as she did accolades for her amazingly high performance on the OWLs and NEWTs. She didn’t care about any of it. She was contemptuous of Dumbledore, too, calling him Dumblefuck behind his back even in her school days. She could see the way that time and time and time again he did everything he could to favour his precious Gryffindors, his precious ‘Lions’, while treating with contempt and hatred the Slytherins, never putting in the same effort, never giving them the same options, always taking every opportunity to humiliate them. Slytherin kids grew up feeling like they were the enemy—the only thing standing in the way of progress, decency, and the triumph of light magic in the British wizarding world.</p><p>So naturally it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and Slytherin students focused on dark magic, on blood purity traditionalism, and on standing in the way of his self-proclaimed progress. What else <em>could </em>they do, when the Ministry of Magic let Britain’s premier wizarding school—the only one which was allowed to administer NEWTs to the bulk of Britain’s wizarding population and therefore the only one that permitted any kind of high achievement career path—be run by an arrogant wizard who demanded the whole world orbit around his vision of sanitised, innocent magic. His delusion that he foisted on everything else to make himself happy about Grindelwald, when every one of the old families knew the dark powers, knew that the legends were a bit truer than anyone gave them credit for.</p><p>The kind of legends which led straight to the Door in the base of Ararat. Bellatrix poured out a thimble of firewhiskey, and drank it, sharp and neat. Her Legilimency had only improved as the war went on, and she couldn’t help but feel Hermione’s memories there when the girl roiled on her sick bed, vulnerable, healing, her mind open to the pain of her actions. She wished like anything else that she could have spared Hermione the act of killing Amycus like that, but what was done was done, and there was no use pining for the impossible outcomes of the past. Fate just as well would have kept them from ever meeting, for all it would have spared Hermione of killing Amycus’ soul.</p><p>But now, it just weighed on her and reminded her of what she had done. Though it was true that she had never done it before, she <em>had </em> reached out and used the slur she’d magically carved with Goblin steel into Hermione’s arm. Used it to <em>help </em> her, still, but used it nonetheless. Taken advantage of a magical connection which Bellatrix was well aware she could manipulate for more, if she wanted to. A magical connection, the mere prospect of which was so horrible to Hermione that Hermione had suggested severing her own arm over it. And Bellatrix was decent enough that, feeling awful about the loss of <em>her </em> arm, imagining Hermione similarly suffering an amputation was unfathomable. Hermione was the one who had held her right hand as she lost her left. That <em>still mattered </em> to her, now that they were together, beyond words. She dreaded the mere prospect, the dark fantasy of having to reprise the gesture for the woman she loved. And yet, she had done exactly what she had promised not to do. <em>Your promises and your lies both always catch up with you, </em>she thought bitterly, and contemplated another glass.</p><p>One of the guards knocked on the door, interrupting, and Bellatrix jerked up. All of Umbridge’s obnoxious pink crap had already been removed, at least. That counted for something, or at least it better.</p><p>“There’s a group of visitors, General. They were passed through by Councillor Naryshkina.”</p><p><em>Obviously not a problem, then… </em>She looked up, and then jerked in surprise.</p><p>It was Andy. With Tonks. Andy, in the traditional robes of a witch, no less, with her hat held under her left arm to the side, and a Slytherin scarf looped over her robes. Bellatrix had never seen Andy with anything Slytherin since she had been disowned, but then, Bellatrix had seen precious little of her sister in the past years…</p><p>“Bella, you’re sitting in my chair,” Andy said drolly. Tonks had this terribly amused grin on her face, which seemed to break through what was otherwise a painful and pitiful expression, a look like the one a person had when they found something funny—at 0700 in the morning on the day after an all-night drinking session when they had been woken up by someone after two hours of sleep.</p><p>“Your chair?” Bella managed one of the most absolutely blank stares of her life, trying to process that statement. She didn’t really think through the implications of Tonks’ appearance.</p><p>“Oh yes.” She extended a scroll to Bella, which unfolded of its own volition:</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Order-in-Council</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Approved by Her Grace the Duchess of Lancaster</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Viceroy for His Majesty...</em>
</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix flicked across the formal declaration which stated, in the name of King Charles on the behest of Narcissa, that …</p><p>She blinked and read it again.</p><p>
  <em> Lady Andromeda Black-Tonks shall be henceforth hold all the prerogatives, duties and responsibilities of the Headmistress, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and shall bring it into conformance with good governance under its Charter, under the regular supervision of the Department of Magical Education, Ministry of Magic, of His Majesty’s Government. </em>
</p><p>Bellatrix looked up blankly. “What the <em> hell, </em>Andy?”</p><p>Tonks broke down laughing, though it was tinged with an edge of mania that Bellatrix was sympathetic to, as it was much like her own.</p><p>Bellatrix looked at that, and then looked at Andromeda. “Wait, is this a bloody joke?”</p><p>“No, absolutely not,” Andy said, and then sighed, and scooted one chair around the desk, pushing it up against the big high-backed leather chair in which Bella sat, and settling down in it casually and leaning across her sister, as Tonks stared at some of the ghastly pink Umbridge-things Bellatrix had swept on the floor, breaking in the process.</p><p>“On the contrary,” Andy continued after a moment of silence from her older sister, “It made perfect sense, when Narcissa put me to it. You see, Bella, there are only Slytherin students here, and they’ve been indoctrinated since the Dark Lord’s conquest, only the students who will be entering their senior year have any experience of a world without him, and there are very few of those, as almost all the classes in the past six years have seen all of their members passed out after six years, and passing their NEWTs, so that they can be sent to war production jobs or front-line fighting positions a year early. I am a Slytherin, and you know very well that despite the direction my life took me, I can certainly speak the language. I am a pureblood myself, but,” she nodded to her daughter, “I have proved amply that I can assuage the concerns of muggles for the conduct of wizards, and also, that I can show the entire magical community compassion while still standing for what’s right. And I am tied to Narcissa, which means she can trust what I will do here. Is that perfect? Certainly not. Did I ever expect it?” She laughed. “Also certainly not. But Narcissa put it to me, and honestly, it made a great deal of sense. If magical Britain is going to have a future, we are going to have to build it with the youth, ourselves. I didn’t want a place in government, but I do admit… My own experience at Hogwarts, your experience, it was not a good one, and the rot only grew worse over the years. Our traditions were not taught in Dumbledore’s era, and yet for all his love of a progressive vision of wizarding-kind, little was done to keep muggle-borns safe at the school. I think we need to make all wizards and witches of Britain confident in their history—whether or not they’re muggleborns or purebloods, they are the people of this soil.”</p><p>“Well, you’re the Headmistress now,” Bellatrix stared at her middle sister for a moment. “I kept encouraging you to do more when you were in Nizhniy, but I never … well, you are a Black.”</p><p>“I am,” Andy agreed, and pointed a single imperious finger at her daughter, who stared back with something of a <em>who me, mom? </em>expression. “And she’s also a Black, Bella.”</p><p>“Yes,” Bellatrix agreed. “But if she starts presenting herself in public as one, there will be a lot more people calling her Nymphadora.”</p><p>Tonks groaned despite herself.</p><p>“So, I will … Give you your chair,” the eldest Black then acknowledged, and rose, and handed it off to her sister. With a laugh, Andy sat down, and put her hat on the desk.</p><p>Bella, rather than sit again, walked around to the other side of the office, pacing.</p><p>“I heard that Hermione was wounded,” Andy offered solicitously. “Is she improving?”</p><p>“She is,” a nod. “Two days now, and she was awake for a while, but very troubled. The detonation which dropped a span of the viaduct injured her… <em>Badly. </em>I… Well, it was a near thing to rescue her in the dark.”</p><p>“A fell feat, to catch someone out of the air,” Andy shook her head, and grinned. Bellatrix felt no impulse to explain further, and let herself, guiltily, bask in her sister’s praise for a moment, and then step out of the way as Andy pointed her wand at the pink enchanted teapot.</p><p>“That was Umbridge’s,” Bellatrix said, aghast. “Do you really need tea that badly?”</p><p>“It’s an enchanted teapot. I haven’t had one around in quite a while, and I don’t care who’s it was before. The water boils,” Andy answered archly.</p><p>“Mum drinks tea by the bucket,” Tonks observed from her chair.</p><p>“I thought so. It’ll be by the tanker after a few years of this job.” Bellatrix nodded gravely. “So, we’re in control of Britain and Hogwarts. Legally, anyhow. Still need to deal with a few armies for the former.”</p><p>“Only you would put it that way,” Andy murmured. “So what’s next?”</p><p>“What <em>is </em>next? You’re the Headmistress! Well, where is Delphini and Teddy?”</p><p>“In Inverness,” Andy smiled. “Narcissa offered. I’m not sure if she’s <em>sleeping, </em>but she considered it very important to get a hand on the situation here. And all the officers in the headquarters treat them like darlings, anyway, so it’s like they have a hundred parents there. I’ll send them for them as soon as the situation here is firmly under control.”</p><p>“Ah.” Bella shrugged and leaned against the wall. “So …”</p><p>Andy quickly cut her off. “Before you ask, or indeed, talk anything more about family matters,” she shot a look at Tonks, and then fixed Bella with a particularly uncomfortable stare. “I want you to bring Umbridge here, please. Immediately.”</p><p>“Oh, is <em>that </em>all?” Bellatrix tossed her hair back. <em>What the devil does Andy want with that pink bitch? </em>“Sure. I’ll send for her, it will be just a minute to send her up from the cell. Why, though? She’s perfectly useless. No intel at all. I already checked.”</p><p>“Did you look around in that scummy mind of her’s and see where they buried my <em>husband</em>?” Tonks’ words bit about as sharp as words could bite, and Bellatrix froze.</p><p>“Oh.” Bellatrix had never prepared for this. She wasn’t ready for the moment when she had to directly face the fact—that the army she had been a part of had killed her niece’s husband, before her eyes in fact, and therefore the woman she had been slowly growing more—tolerant? fond?–of was expecting her help in recovering the body of her husband. The father of her child. <em>Because, you know, Dolohov killed your nephew-in-law. </em>She tried to think of what to say, but nothing productive came to mind.</p><p>“I’ll get her at once,” she said in the end, nothing more, nothing left, in a very small voice, and turned away. Tonks’ eyes never left her until she departed the room.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Umbridge was bedraggled, certainly, as a few days in an improvised prison cell would do to someone. The first day had been the most unpleasant, no doubt, before the castle had created a bathroom for her in the room in which she had been locked—as its powerful magic had a habit of rearranging things to do. <em> I bet you had never had to shit in a bucket before, </em>Bella smirked to herself. It was easy to push aside the sudden, unexpected wave of guilt that she felt, over the death of Remus Lupin.</p><p>Bella stood next to Andy, sitting in the Headmistress’ chair which had until a few days ago been Umbridge’s. She looked around her former office with dull shock. Andy had unpacked some of her things, and the portraits had been taken up from the basement and put on the walls—Dumbledore’s portrait had managed some nice words for Andromeda as the new Headmistress, at least, mumbling on about how proud of her he was.</p><p>The two sisters, side by side. Tonks was there—but having taken the form of a male MinKol officer, unrecognisable to Umbridge. It seemed that Umbridge was almost struck dumb by seeing the two of them side by side. Finally she spoke. “Treason to Our Lord, I already expected, Lestrange. But consorting with Blood Traitors? <em> Andromeda Tonks? </em>”</p><p>Bella cackled, and the sound made Umbridge freeze. Perhaps, then, she recognised that she had just gone down a path which was not wise, with one of the most dangerous witches alive. Bellatrix rested her hand on the back of Andy’s chair, while her sister reached up and gently put a hand against her hip, urging her to be calm. Bellatrix did not feel like being calm, though, but she respected Andy and managed to, against all odds, in fact remain calm.</p><p>“Miss Umbridge, I don’t think insults are going to help your cause,” Andy at last observed, quite mildly, and reached for her tea. Umbridge was offered none, and neither was she given the opportunity to sit. “I am now the Headmistress of Hogwarts.”</p><p>“My good Slytherin students will <em>never </em>obey a Blood Traitor,” Umbridge answered with a haughty sneer. “Your sister has given you a poisoned chalice.”</p><p>Andromeda raised her cup, and sipped her tea, eyeing Umbridge with brown eyes across the top. “We’ll see. But I really meant it. You should stop insulting me. We have brought you here to ask a particular question, and I would have you answer it.”</p><p>“I will answer nothing,” Umbridge rallied and smirked. “You must provide me with a solicitor.”</p><p>“Why would you be provided with a solicitor?” Andy asked, almost in what seemed like genuine confusion.</p><p>“It is my right under law for a trial before the Wizengamot!”</p><p>“You will not be tried before the Wizengamot,” Andy answered, and the grin which Bella could no longer hide from her face began to make Umbridge lose her nerve. Andy, alas, was too good of a person to prolong this. “No, Miss Umbridge, you are to be Attaindered by an Act of Parliament.”</p><p>The vinegar left her in that moment. It had returned, when she had realised that Bellatrix did not intend to immediately execute her, and she thought, or fancied, that she could hold her own at a trial. Perhaps it had been easy for her to fancy that the side they fought against would insist on trials.</p><p>But Narcissa was not Dumbledore. An Act of Attainder. And Andy looked cool and inflexible at her, as if bothered not a wit by it, despite her own association, once upon a time (albeit in a non-combat role), with the Order of the Phoenix. The office took on a certain chill, and Bellatrix was laughing silently, gloved hand gripped onto the top of the back of the chair.</p><p>No, Narcissa really wasn’t Dumbledore.</p><p>“So, Umbridge,” Bella began, and cut off, because she was laughing. The woman in front of her looked more and more panicked, as if the psychological terror of a bemused Bellatrix Black was exceeding all that she could handle in that moment, as she understood exactly what an Act Attainder meant. “Best not insult my sister, or Her Grace, Duchess Narcissa may be inclined to bring harsher terms to Parliament for your Attainder.”</p><p>“Parliament,” Umbridge stuttered, “is a small band of refugees meeting in Russia.”</p><p>The older witch’s eyes glinted. “I know. After a few cabbage winters, they aren’t likely to be in a forgiving mood, either. So are you going to cooperate?”</p><p>“I know nothing of importance!” Umbridge shrieked. “Nothing! Nothing! I just ran the school! With discipline, and the decency of Our Lord’s doctrine!”</p><p>“But you know where the bodies are buried, don’t you?” Bellatrix straightened up, went in sharp for the kill. “<em>Don’t you?”</em></p><p>“What bodies, I…”</p><p>“The bodies of the defenders of Hogwarts, don’t act stupid, you were the one in charge of cleaning up and taking control of the school,” Bellatrix continued. “We want to know where the graves are. What did you do to them? We want them.”</p><p>“You were there yourself!” Umbridge, glaring, looking bedraggled, horrified, scared, but perhaps not without a bit of fight or perhaps with some reckless arrogance still, shot back. It made Andy ever so faintly wince.</p><p>“Oh yes,” Umbridge was laughing. “Don’t like remembering that do you? The Dark Lord’s Lieutenant, and you’re faking being part of a happy family again. Well, she was there, why don’t you just go ahead and ask?”</p><p>“You well know,” Bellatrix replied with a voice now utterly cold, “that the Dark Lord instructed me to a hot pursuit of the beaten enemy. I wasn’t there to see what you did with the dead. And he would not have granted that task to anyone other than one of his most completely useless and obsequious followers. So go ahead and answer, or I’ll show you how much my Legilimency has improved in the past years. I’ll enjoy taking that information from you even more than I enjoyed putting Rookwood under the Imperious curse before he was executed.”</p><p>Both her sister and Tonks, hidden as the guard, flinched at that. It was a visceral reminder of just what Bellatrix was capable of.</p><p>But it got the message across to Umbridge. She wilted. “Alright. The Dark Lord told me to never reveal it. He never wanted anyone to know… To know the location of Harry Potter’s body.”</p><p>“It’s one grave?”</p><p>“One mass grave,” she agreed.</p><p>One mass grave for the defenders of Hogwarts.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>An Act Attainder is a law passed by Parliament convicting and punishing someone for a crime. This is legal under the Westminster system, but has been specifically outlawed in some other Common Law jurisdictions like the United States. Winston Churchill proposed it as a means to punish the Nazis after WWII, because he opposed the concept of ex post facto law which Nuremberg represented.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0067"><h2>67. Harry</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Chapter posted a day early. Another should follow on Monday.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Harry</b>
</p><p> </p><p>That evening, both Andy and Tonks were sitting together in the Headmistress’ apartments. The accumulated petty trifles of Umbridge’s personal possessions had been taken away. In their place had come the packs the women had brought. Over time, Andy would doubtless fill the space with her own personal possessions. She was also going to be one of the first Headmistresses of Hogwarts in a very long time who would be prospectively raising young children at the school while running it.</p><p>But, Tonks had insisted she thought that was okay for Teddy. Andy knew Bella would have no objections, when it came to Delphini. The more wizards and witches saw her as a normal girl, the better. Ultimately, it would be possible for Bella and Hermione to take over raising their daughter, but… <em>Their daughter. Yes, it’s true. They’re a couple in that serious sense. </em></p><p><em>It’s for the best, by far. Delphini will do so much better raised by Hermione than by Bellatrix alone, considering… </em>Considering her niece’s parentage on the paternal side. That was the lion in the room, best never spoke of again. Delphini Black was <em>Lady Slytherin, Lady Gaunt, </em>and perhaps it would have been best to let those names be fallow and forgotten and those lines extinct, but instead, someday, she would also be <em>Lady Black, </em>and all three lines would be combined into one. But if she was raised in a marriage of two witches, one a muggle-born, she might yet just turn out all alright.</p><p>In the meanwhile of her reverie, Tonks had uncorked the bottle of Firewhisky, and poured out another round for them both. Andy raised the snifter and nodded to her daughter. “Thank you.”</p><p>“Not a problem, mum. Being a widow sucks.”</p><p>“It does,” Andy agreed wryly. That was never something she had ever, <em>ever, </em>ever wanted to share with her daughter. But there they were. “We’ll have everything arranged for tomorrow.” Umbridge had named a spot just inside of the Forbidden Forest, far enough in to deter casual approach, far enough out to avoid conflicts with the Centaurs and Acromantulas.</p><p>“Thank you.” Tonks paused. “I want to run out there and start digging in the middle of the dark. We’re going to find <em>all </em>of them, mum...” She trailed off, and slammed back half of the snifter.</p><p>Andy reached out and put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Easy. I’m not actually sure you should see it. It’s… You know it’s been six years, and there’s going to need to be forensics.”</p><p>“Mum, he’s there in a hole in the ground. I feel guilty about leaving him there even <em>one more day.</em>” Her face twisted up into a sneer of rage and fury as her hair was shot through with red and black in an involuntary change. “Honestly, Remus… Neville… Harry. They’re <em>all </em>there. McGonagall. Half the Order. And Gods know what was done to them.”</p><p>Andy sank back in her chair, trying to manage the weight of her daughter’s self-destructive impulses. Tonks still had a sense of the absurd, but it had been twisted in war. And she had the terrible self-destructive impulse that she showed now. Yes, it was not about risk-tasking, but it was an awful desire to see the grave exhumed, with no benefit to herself. Andy tried to be reasonable. “Dear, think about it this way… If you let others do it, it’s a job for them. A reverent job, a bad job, they know these were the wives, husbands, fathers, sons, mothers and daughters of other living people… They won’t do a bad job. But they don’t know them personally. You do. You absolutely <em> do not </em>want to see this. You want to see the funerals.”</p><p>Tonks clenched her teeth, staring like she could see through the wall. Her right fist tightened, clenched around the heavy glass of firewhisky. “I want to see Remus one more time, no matter what condition he’s in. I want to see Neville. I want to see Harry.”</p><p>Andromeda closed her eyes, and took a gulp from her own snifter, letting it burn down her throat. “Nobody will stop you, when they’re in their coffins. But. Let the specialists do all they can first, please?”</p><p>Tonks gave her a single small nod.</p><p>Andy leaned against her daughter and squeezed her into a hug. She accepted; they just lay together, hugging, mother and daughter, for some length of time that seemed like forever. What else could they do? Since the day they escaped from the Humber, almost six years before, since the battle of Hogwarts, when her brother-in-law, Tonks’ uncle, had helped guide them across the sea…</p><p>Billions dead.</p><p>Friends mouldering in mass graves.</p><p>War to the knife, war to the bone, war without end.</p><p>Their own family at the middle of it. Always in the front rank.</p><p>...On both sides.</p><p>Some of the people that Tonks wanted to mourn had been killed by Bellatrix on that miserable day. <em> Bella. </em>The manic genius older sister, never happy or comfortable with her life… Just like Andy had been. She reached out, held her daughter closer, then, thankful for her as she could be for few things at that point. “We’re going to put it back together, I promise,” she whispered softly, face pressed up into her daughter’s hair.</p><p>“Only by forgetting the past,” Tonks answered in quiet agony.</p><p>Duchess Narcissa.</p><p>Bellatrix, Lady Black.</p><p>Andy’s childhood playmates. The Black Sisters had always loved each other. They had always been close to each other, until, she had made her fateful decision to escape from the life appointed for her, and blood purity had torn her family apart. The same ideology which would ultimately be the cause of her comforting her daughter for the death of her husband—and for the death of the boy who had saved Tonks’ life.</p><p>There wouldn’t be any easy answers. There wouldn’t be any clean redemption or quick solution—Tonks was just working her way through the reality of a world where a woman like Bellatrix could be both villain and hero, and never account for anything. Andy couldn’t find anything to say to that. She was so thankful that she had her daughter—and she was so thankful she had her sisters, and a family, after all this terrible war. Her husband was dead, but, Bella had not been involved in his murder. She could move on.</p><p>It was harder for Tonks. Quietly, in the midst of her mother’s arms, the metamorph shifted into a smaller form—herself in her veriform, her natural form, at around the age of eleven right before going to Hogwarts. Tangled masses of brown curls, liquid grey eyes, very fair, freckled skin. Andy was used to her daughter sometimes transforming in her arms and shifted to hold her closer around loose clothes. This was Tonks admitting to her mum in a most vulnerable way just how much affection she needed.</p><p>So her mother held her closer. “There is going to be a future for us all, with the Dark Lord defeated. We will manage it.”</p><p>“Not for the dead, and … Bellatrix.” In fact, at that moment, Tonks looked more like Bellatrix than she ever normally did. But <em>not </em>looking like a classic Black was part of her preference, normally. For precisely this reason. “What’s going to happen. Tell me honestly. You can see, just like it was today, how she herself—she vacillates from guilt to cackling delight in punishing her <em>former allies. </em>I can feel part of that in me. The contempt for the absurdity of convention and rules, sure. But, gods, I don’t know her as a person. I’m scared of it. She <em>killed them. </em>What’s going to happen to her? Tell me honestly.”</p><p>“Your aunt <em>Narcissa </em>is a very clever woman. She made the King grant her County Palatine powers over Lancashire. In fact, her choice of her reward was all about Bella, because she loves Bella, just… Just like I do, Dora. In fact, she intends to make Lancashire into an autonomous territory by calling its own Parliament, and promoting a cultural revival there with the teaching of Cumbric. She knows it will mostly fail, but she can exploit English political divisions anyway to make the reform stick. The cultural zeitgeist of the age has been completely broken. People are open to the past—democracy, capitalism, modernism all seem called into question by the revelation of magic. So she believes opposition to the autonomy of Lancashire will be muted. Anyway, the important thing is that she is now the ruler in the sense of a true feudal vassal of Charles; she has the writ there, not the King. And she did that for Bella. Oh, it will make her rich, and make Draco the foremost Peer of the Realm, sure, and she did it for those reasons, too. But for her entire natural life, Narcissa will be able to deny writ of arrest for Bella. No government in London will, under law, be able to compel her surrender. As long as Bella stays within the borders of the County Palatine, she will be immune from arrest.”</p><p>“And… That’s that? Manchester, Liverpool, Lancaster, Blackpool, the Fells, the southern part of the Lakes Country, it’s all there,” Tonks murmured softly. “Ancient House, too. And so Narcissa has set it up so Bellatrix can roam there and live there however she pleases, with no restrictions. That’s all the Longbottoms, Sirius, Dobby and all the others will get. That’s a pretty tepid measure of justice.”</p><p>“Her arm, too.” Andy said, thinking of her sister and the almost irreconcilable difference between what she wanted—<em>her big sister back, damnit—</em>and what her daughter wanted. Or thought she wanted. And even this scarcely seemed like the truth. Andy was well aware that the game had changed. Doggerland’s rising was being treated as miraculous by many. Narcissa and Bellatrix’s currency was rising by the day. This was a world of fell magic. There was no particular government on their side prepared to stand up and demand a criminal accounting of Bellatrix Black. The County Palatine might prove only a fall-back.</p><p>Tonks was silent for a little while.</p><p>“Do you believe that redemption is possible?”</p><p>“Yes, mum. But what is it without justice?”</p><p>“I think Bella’s still trying to figure that out for herself. I just have to have faith that her relationship with Hermione represents that change, as much as she struggles with the outward expression of it. I’ve got to. I want all of us to be happy.”</p><p>On this rawest of nights in this rawest of places, Tonks was not yet ready to follow, and Andy could just hold her, and hope for the end of the war to come soon, to give them the time they needed. But she doubted it would be so, and held her daughter all the closer for it.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione stirred in bed again. <em> The Ward. </em> She was used to this place, too used to it, to put it mildly. She had spent so much time here thanks to her adventures with Harry and Ron in school—and then, the less adventurous adventures, trying to face Voldemort. Being petrified by the Basilisk, getting turned into a catgirl (some deranged part of her brain wondered how Bellatrix would have reacted to that—would it have been arousing or off-putting?)-- <em> God no stop don’t think that don’t think that you must still be under the influence of drugs… </em></p><p>Harry. Her mind locked onto thinking of Harry, and her emotions fell. But there was a feeling of someone near, nonetheless. She could feel crisp black leather against her hand, against her cheek.</p><p>
  <em> Bellatrix. </em>
</p><p>Her mind felt pulled in two directions. Harry and Bellatrix. The two parts of her life that she could never quite reconcile. Hermione tried to blink her eyes open, and saw here there—the one who lived. Cascade of curled dark hair, patrician features, eyes rich with real sympathy, sympathy for <em> her, </em>sympathy which had burned away the memories of hate and torture. Sitting in a chair at her bedside.</p><p><em> Awwh, how romantic. </em>Hermione smiled, rallied, temporarily cleared her head of the thoughts of the dead, and coughed to clear her throat. Bellatrix pressed a cup of water to her lips and she drank, before then managing to speak. “I admit, having a girlfriend here to wake up to in the past would have been nice.”</p><p>“Councillor Tikhonov says you can leave when you finish waking up, but you need to be on light duty for another two weeks with a continuation of a potion regimen.”</p><p>“What happened, anyway?”</p><p>“Not remembering it is supposed to be normal, he called it a … Traumatic Brain Injury. From the concussive blast. Unfortunately, several of the team curse-breaking and disposing of the charges… Failed, and didn’t make it. But, of course, as you can tell, we took Hogwarts anyway. The Lovegood girl brought up some tree trunks as improvised bridging gear, and we crossed the span they dropped. Umbridge was using children to defend the castle.” Bellatrix’s voice took on a sneering contempt, there.</p><p>Hermione, reflecting on her own experiences, and on the way others reacted to them, had grown more and more disgusted by the thought. She twisted up her lips and frowned, growing tense throughout her body. Honestly, Umbridge leading those poor kids into battle made her wonder why the bitch was still alive. Something just snapped, as Bellatrix busied herself helping Hermione be propped up on the pillows. “Why didn’t you just kill her?”</p><p>“Oh, I wanted to, but you remember. Cissy made me promise not to. Anyway, Andy said she’ll be subject to an Attainder.”</p><p>“...Andy’s here? An <em>Act of Attainder? </em>Cissy’s planning that, isn’t she?”</p><p>“There’s no way to reconstitute the courts quickly, and it lets her levy punishment as she sees fit, so of course she is,” Bella shrugged. “And yes, apparently… Cissy appointed her the new Headmistress of Hogwarts. She arrived with Tonks, though, her first act is to organise, well..”</p><p>“What?” Hermione looked to her, catching her tone, telling how miserable it was. Bella was really, genuinely uncomfortable in that moment. “What’s her first act?”</p><p>“It’s an awful business and I don’t know if you really want to reprise it.”</p><p>“Actually I want to know everything, and you of all people know better than to try and spare me after all that I have seen, Bella.”</p><p>“They’re conducting a recovery operation at the mass grave where Umbridge had the defenders of Hogwarts buried, after the battle.”</p><p>Hermione froze, and felt herself shivering. <em> Harry. </em>There would be no ignoring it, now. “Do they know … Is Harry’s body in it?”</p><p>“I don’t know,” Bellatrix answered frankly. “I stayed out of that whole business; I had better things to do. It was all on Umbridge, and whatever instructions the Dark Lord gave her, I suppose.”</p><p>The younger witch sucked in her breath, and grabbed at Bella’s gloved hand, squeezed hard. It was her metal hand, and it evidenced no pain no matter how tightly she held it. Maybe a little bit of her was glad for that because she was gripping, squeezing, hard enough to cause pain in anyone else, on any other limb. It was a reminder that she was sleeping with the enemy. That at the time her best friend had died, Bella… Had been on the other side.</p><p>“Fuck me,” Hermione muttered, her mind seized with that insatiable desire to <em>know things </em>that she had always held. “I’ve got to see.”</p><p>“No, I really don’t encourage it. It’s been six years, there won’t be much left except for bones. Except for clothes and … Fuck, I don’t even want to talk about this, ‘Mione.”</p><p>Hermione fixed a hard look at her. “I’m not leaving Harry. I’ll put it to you plain, Bellatrix. We’ll go together. I’m going to be there for my friend. It’s the last thing I can do for him. And you’re going to be with me, and you’ll suck it up and be there for me, while I’m there for him. Yes it’s going to be awful and yes it’s going to be burned into my mind for the rest of the rest of my left, but that’s the life I was given, and I am not taking the coward’s way out with being his friend. We’re going.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked at her for a solid minute, silent. Then her head jerked unevenly in acknowledge. “Let’s get you up, get you dressed, get you some tea, and something simple to settle your stomach. You don’t want to go just to faint. And then we’ll go together.” The sigh that followed seemed to carry all the bitter resignation in the world.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Dressed in their greatcoats against a cold rain of early spring upon the Highlands, Bellatrix and Hermione stood inside of the forbidden forest. Hermione still felt weak, and she leaned against Bella to stand. A group of MinKol wizards who specialised in this unpleasant task had been brought in. There were only four of them.</p><p>Andy had arrived, and made arrangements that the older Slytherin students, who had collaborated in Umbridge’s defence of the castle, should be required to assist them, as there were not enough MinKol personnel to properly excavate the mass grave on their own. After some reflection, Andromeda had decided—since, as the Headmistress of Hogwarts, they were her’s to punish—that assisting with the recovery of the remains would be their punishment.</p><p>A hole had been crudely dug in the woods. Here, the bodies had been thrown, and a loose layer of soil cast over it. Later on, more had been added, to hide them from any student who might go looking, rather than to provide them any dignity. They could see Centaurs watching from the edge of the woods further back, but they did nothing to intervene.</p><p>The team had brought in a line of standard issue Russian military body bags. Hermione didn’t have the slightest idea of how many of these had been used over the past five years, and here they were at Hogwarts too. “Cargo 200,” she muttered softly; dead soldiers, going for their final burial. Some of the first in this very long and very bloody war.</p><p>They started to haul the bodies out, and Hermione’s breath hitched. She winced, visibly, unable to believe what she was seeing, and grabbed tightly onto Bella’s artificial arm. Held it harder, squeezed it as hard as she could as her mind went blank, and then pulled hard, hard, turning away, pulling so hard she wasn’t sure if someone inside she wanted to rip the metal arm off of Bella’s body, and perhaps beat her with it. She stumbled and staggered away, feeling sick despite a humble meal of a half cup of tea and buttered bread. She staggered, dragging Bella, dragging a Bella who had seen, too, who knew precisely what had happened… <em>When did she know, when did she know!? </em></p><p>Hermione shoved her lover into the trunk of a tree at the edge of the woods, hard. “<em>When did you know? Damn it, when did you know?” </em></p><p>“Now,” Bellatrix gasped. “<em>Now. </em>I swear it to Nemetona as matron of this place, may I be struck down if I lie. I didn’t go back to Hogwarts for years after the battle, I didn’t want to, I didn’t need to. Hate the fucking place, to be honest with you.”</p><p>Hermione had her grabbed by the lapels, her eyes wide, she could feel the rage inside of her body. She could feel it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to feel anything else, as waves of both fury and nausea pounded through her. “Not, helping.” She gasped out, almost shaking Bella before she relented of it, and let the older witch stagger down from the tree trunk. And then fell into her, sobbing, fell into her warm embrace and the crush of her heavy clothes and coat. “Oh my God. Why why why?”</p><p>Bella’s voice took on a flat timbre. “Know this… He was mutilated when she buried him, to cripple his spirit, and make it unbearable for you.”</p><p>Shuddering, shaking, shivering, Hermione looked up, her face pale. She recognised that. “That’s a paraphrase of The Oresteia.”</p><p>Bella smiled weakly. “How do you think Narcissa was named?”</p><p>“<em>Can there be no justice?</em>” Enfolded in her arms, Hermione punched Bella’s chest, padded through the multiple layers she wore, the cold rain lashing them.</p><p>“The Gods have a way of bringing it in their own time,” Bellatrix murmured, barely above a whisper, refusing to be shifted from her place by Hermione’s futile blows.</p><p>“I believed in nothing, but now, I feel if I don’t believe in something, that I shall have nothing inside of me at all,” Hermione wailed, feeling an emptiness and a rage within her. “The parson of that stupid church my parents went to when I was little would tell me to trust it all to Christ, but I <em>don’t fucking want to forgive! I need to know, I need to know! Where the hell are they?” </em></p><p>“The Gods of my ancestors need no such meekness from you, Hermione,” Bella murmured, the liquid pools of her gaze, misted with the faintest of tears, staring into Hermione’s brown eyes—utterly overcoming with sobbing, but her face struck pale with a growing rage.</p><p>“Good. Then perhaps I will not need to ask their forgiveness for this!” She pulled away from Bella, staring at her, her mind made up. Turned. Began to run back toward Hogwarts.</p><p>“Narcissa wants her in Inverness alive, Hermione! Narcissa wants her alive!” Bella’s voice echoed after her, but she did not care.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione had wiped the tears from her face by the time she arrived back in the castle. They could not be discerned from the water that covered her head, and melted down into her greatcoat which had kept her warm in the Highland rain. The guards snapped to attention and saluted as she passed. There was nobody to stop her.</p><p>“<em>Alohomora securitas,</em>” she directed, specifically, to unlock the sealed door on Umbridge’s cell. The woman looked up to her from the floor where she sat. The castle had provided her a bathroom after the first days—its magic reconfigured it to the demand of people—and she was not that bad off, except that she was bedraggled and unwashed for almost a week.</p><p>She opened her mouth. Of course she did. Of course she had to. “Why, Hermione Granger… The years have <em>not </em>been kind to you.”</p><p>“I’ve been living in freedom the entire time. I’d say that’s kind enough. What did you do to them, Umbridge? <em>What did you do?” </em></p><p>“I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about,” she answered, her eyes confused at first, and then growing distressed.</p><p>“Like Hell. You were responsible for <em>disposing </em>of our heroes. You know exactly what I’m referring to.”</p><p>“I did nothing, though. I just had a grave arranged.”</p><p>“A hole in the forest, with a foot of dirt carelessly strewn across the top. But that means you had to know. <em>Where are their heads, Umbridge? THEY’RE MISSING THEIR HEADS! WHERE ARE THEIR HEADS!?” </em></p><p>“The Dark Lord did it! The Dark Lord did it! I had nothing to do with it!”</p><p>“You buried the bodies, though. Where? Where? WHERE?” Hermione would never know exactly the point where she became capable of it, but capable of it, she was.</p><p>“<em>Crucio.</em>” She didn’t scream it. She didn’t shout it. But there was something dreadful in her voice, dreadfully sure, and possessed of a pale righteous fury to compare to few other things.</p><p>And then Umbridge did all the screaming that was needed, for both of them. “Where?”</p><p>Sobbing and gasping and convulsing on the ground, Umbridge stuttered in blind fear. “Their heads were hung in the Great Hall until the repairs were complete and school opened for the next year… I got the Dark Lord’s permission to take them down before the children came, to avoid upsetting them, they only hung for the summer, I promise, I promise, I wasn’t the one who did it, I wasn’t the one…”</p><p>“Hermione, what the fuck just happened?”</p><p>Hermione slammed the cell shut in Umbridge’s face, and slowly turned, to see Tonks standing there. She felt dead, absolutely dead inside. Tonks was staring at her in horror. <em>She saw you do it. </em></p><p>A tired, indifferent shrug, and she walked toward Tonks.</p><p>“Hermione…”</p><p>“Voldemort mutilated them before he buried them, Tonks. I’m going to let the team know where the heads are buried, so they can be – put together, in their coffins.”</p><p>Tonks froze. Looked down toward the cell, where Umbridge was still shaking and sobbing in shock and pain for the Cruciatus curse. Looked back to Hermione.</p><p>Without another word, Tonks turned and followed Hermione out.</p><p>At the courtyard, Hermione stepped out, back into the rain, to find Bellatrix standing there, talking to Andromeda, with her eyes wide. She thought about what to say. She wondered if she should rage, or if she should hug her, but in the end, she just nodded at the two Black sisters. “She told me where,” Hermione offered simply to them.</p><p>“Hermione, did you…” Bella stared.</p><p>“She’s still alive.”</p><p>Behind her, Tonks just nodded once.</p><p>Andromeda started to cry.</p>
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<a name="section0068"><h2>68. The Flowers of the Forest</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Flowers of the Forest</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Hermione and Bellatrix returned to Inverness the next day. Steam was brought up on the Hogwarts Express, and the small group of prisoners—Morsmordre Aurors and Umbridge—was loaded aboard with some guards. Hermione sat in silence, as they went south, making time through the vast expanse of the Hogwarts preserve. It fit into the world like a glove, a non-euclidean geometry which had obscured the true shape of things. The Forbidden Forest was <em> huge, </em> the area around Hogsmeade was <em> huge, </em>and the Goblin communities in the area also were huge. In fact, the preserve had something like 900 sq. km. of land, which was almost impossible for Muggles to access, and when confused ramblers and hikers did get in, they saw only ruins; in fact, Scotland was 1.2% larger by land than anyone knew, because of the area around Hogwarts.</p><p>Hermione kept herself distracted by thinking how the map of the world when change when the war was over, and all these places would be documented and acknowledged. But, it had its own problems. Thule, Lyonesse, the Hesperides (which included Mam, Antillia, and St. Brendan’s), Hy-Brasil and Ys were all entirely magical communities. They were strongly pureblood. A great bronze statue of Princess Dahut still marked the gates of Ys, celebrating her revolt against her father which she had led because of his intent of mandating conversion to Christianity, and allowing Muggles into the city. She had driven her father out, and drowned the priests, obscuring the city from Muggle sight. Though all had small populations—the Hesperides were the greatest with fifty thousand people—they would present an enormous challenge to integrate with the world. <em> The death of rationalism. </em> But science and engineering still produced <em> results. </em>Results that ranged from trains to guns to aeroplanes.</p><p>All used in the service of War, now.</p><p>They ran past the anti-apparation wards, and halted on the line. It was time. The guards collected Umbridge and the dozen or so other prisoners. Hermione wordlessly nodded to Bella, she wasn’t in the mood to talk and the older witch saw enough of it that she understood not to bother her. They apparated separately, to avoid the discomfort of sidealong. In truth, Hermione was glad to be away from Hogwarts.</p><p>When they arrived in the city, the fact that they were transporting prisoners quickly became obvious. Umbridge and the others were pelted with stones in the street, and Hermione had to improvise a transfiguration of one of the buttons on her greatcoat into a police whistle; that did the trick, some things in British life did not change. “There there now, no shambles! We won’t have a lynching in Scotland! It will be the King’s Justice for them!”</p><p>That served to get them inside of the security cordon at the Royal Highland Hotel. The prisoners were then separated and hauled off to some goods vans spotted at the Inverness Station platforms and being used as detention cells. “I could use to never see her again,” Hermione muttered, brushing down her uniform with her hands as she slung her coat onto a rack. That part of the hotel hadn’t changed. Bella followed suit, but she couldn’t resist sing-songing “oh, we may get one more chance…”</p><p>Hermione paused for a moment, shrugged, and headed up. She was surprised, when they arrived at Narcissa’s office, to see … <em> Blaise Zabini? </em>No, she wasn’t surprised, after all. He was dressed very finely, in a Royal Navy dress uniform of an Admiral. Narcissa saw them entering, and rose. “Ah, Bellatrix, Hermione, some renewed introductions are in order. If I may—Duke Blaise, the Duke of Albemarle. His squadrons have entered the North Sea to support the offensive.”</p><p>“Lady Black, Colonel Granger.”</p><p>In uniform, Hermione saluted. Bellatrix smiled and extended a gloved hand; Blaise took it. Then she peered a bit over his shoulder—and sucked in her breath. “Meli.”</p><p>“Ah yes, I know that you and Lady Zabini are very well acquainted,” Narcissa spoke as the very epitome of politeness. “Please, all of you, sit, take tea.”</p><p>The Afro-Portuguese woman whose physical attractiveness at Bella’s age, without the help of the Water of Life to heal her, in fact still exceeded Bella’s. She exuded confidence and composure and controlled sensuality. Amélia Zabini had few rivals alive, including in the rumours of dark sorcery, black magic and murder which had accrued to her over the years, always without proof. She looked to Bellatrix for a long while, raising her own tea cup. Hermione had to thrust one into Bella’s hands already prepared the way she liked it, with Bella distractedly taking the cup. “I’m glad you escaped,” the Lady Black offered after a minute’s silence.</p><p>“I’m glad <em>you </em>escaped, Bella,” ‘<em>Meli</em>’ acknowledged at last. “I can tell that you have. Finally.”</p><p>Hermione looked between the two quizzically. “I assume…”</p><p>“Colonel Granger, Bella and I were best friends at Hogwarts,” Meli explained after a moment.</p><p>“Oh.” <em>Well, of course Bella had friends once. Still looks like they care about each other, even. </em>“Was it hard, getting out of the south?”</p><p>“It was uncomfortable;” Meli acknowledged. “I crossed the frontier to Scotland packed into a goods van, then hiked across the Grampians until I was out of the range of any Morsmordre wizards using detection charms, and apparated here. Duchess Narcissa was already so kind as to arrange the services of a tailor, so all’s well.”</p><p>The picture of composure, indeed, and that after spending days sandwiched into a goods van. Mother and son—and who knew what kind of relationship that was—regarded each other for a moment. “Anyway, I’m very pleased, Blaise, that this all came together,” Meli added, before looking to Narcissa. “So, what’s next?”</p><p>Narcissa delicately and very deliberately used her wand to push back a single lock of blonde hair. “I send these two,” she tapped it toward Bella and Hermione, “straight to the front, and we prepare for the push south. There will be some officers around to interview you, about the disposition of the forces in the Grampians. As for the rest? Well, perhaps it is time for me to explain in some detail my plan, in regard to our Celtic sisters and brothers.” She leaned closer across her desk, the grin on her patrician face mingling the fair features of the Rosier with the Black, confident and in command. But that would still be the true test of what she intended.</p><p>And as much as she was sheepish to admit it to herself, Hermione was happy to ignore the weird dynamic between Mrs. Zabini and Bellatrix in favour of nerding out over proposed constitutional arrangements.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p><em>Lady Bellatrix Black. </em>She had wanted the title for most of her life. The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black should have been her’s, by the old laws they had once lived by, in ages past. Instead, she had been married off, and as the war destroyed line after line, she had crept closer to the right, only for it to fall into the hands of one Sirius Black.</p><p>And then, hating each other, they had both gone to Azkaban, but only one of them had deserved it.</p><p>In fact, Bellatrix was quite convinced nobody deserved Azkaban, but her conviction, she could not deny. Seeing the sea out beyond her headquarters command post, tents and canvas lean-tos on command tracks, still made her uncomfortable. Facing her mission on the <em>Ushakov </em>had been a terrible trial of her own soul.</p><p>But she had faced the storm, faced the ocean, faced Azkaban, and it was a ruin now. While the whole of Doggerland had been lifted out of the murk of the North Sea, as if it were an undoing of the ancient magic of the Storegga Slide (though the Slide itself remained firmly embedded in the abyssal of the Norwegian Sea), a crater was all that marked what had once been the highest point—Azkaban. In times hence people could hike to the heights of land on the island and find there the crater-lake, and wonder how it was wrought.</p><p>Well, that would be an immortal tribute to her, one way or another. There were few women who could be as well-recorded in history as she would. Boudicca and Queen Medb, mostly. Taking Aberdeen could be added to the list of accomplishments, though that counted for little as, from her headquarters just south of Milltimber, she watched the guns firing into the heights of the Kerloch. Unless they broke past Stonehaven, the rest might yet matter very little. Many invasions had been launched into England from the North in the history of the British Isles, and very few of them had succeeded.</p><p>Stonehaven itself was under fire from the cruisers <em> Belfast </em> and <em> Aguirre, </em> the later a Dutch-built ship loaned from the Peruvian Navy to the Morsmordre as reinforcements, and now under the White Ensign. The twenty 155mm cannon between them were hammering the town, wreathing the bell-tower over the market square with smoke and tongues of flame as buildings crumbled under the naval shelling. Three <em> Sovremenny </em>-class destroyers were also present, each bearing four automatic 130mm cannon and using them to add to the destruction. The war had finally come to visit the British Isles truly, and in the past week of storm, it had visited them like nothing else.</p><p>But most of the country was still untouched, and certainly un-nuked. Bellatrix had also observed, quite notably, that the Scottish troops she was opposing had withdrawn rather than fight street-to-street in Aberdeen and destroy the city. The Janissary divisions had been posted in the Highlands—they would not have withdrawn (despite the Scots arguably being better troops), but then, the city would have been destroyed. The Scottish national troops had preferred to fall back, establish their artillery at the Kerloch, and dig in at Stonehaven instead. In short, they were making decisions like they knew that their enemy was civilised.</p><p>She supposed she should take it as a compliment.</p><p>All well and good. Her job wasn’t to defeat and destroy them decisively. Narcissa had made that <em> abundantly </em>clear. As Narcissa had put it, this campaign was educational. Bella had always preferred the kind of education which killed people, anyway. She could see Hermione, standing over some equipment, twelve paces away. A reminder of her own sense of guilt at the fact that they still hadn’t had a conversation about the mark, about exactly how Bellatrix had saved her life on the viaduct. She was rationalising to herself that Hermione hardly needed more stress after the ‘recovery operation’ at Hogwarts.</p><p>She turned back to the magnified image before her. The tanks advanced cautiously against an enemy fighting hull-down to the west of Stonehaven, and the crackling of small arms marked where a single battalion of infantry was occupying buildings in the northern part of the town, waiting for the artillery to open paths for them.</p><p>Then, sharply, the scream of a jet overhead made her lower her wand, dispersing the enhancement spell that let her clearly see the action ahead, every muscle tensing and ready for action.</p><p>She at once readied her wand to cast a <em> protego, </em>instinctively, against an attack from above. But the Morsmordre Air Force had been devastated by the tsunamis—an unexpected stroke of luck to make the campaign easier—and several major airbases in the north of Scotland had already been brought back into action for the Russian Air Force. The jets were friendlies, passing into another engagement.</p><p>Hermione turned back toward her from the telex. “Seen what you wanted to?” She asked, absolutely composed, message in one hand, tea in the other.</p><p>“Not completely. I was distracted by the expectation we were about to be bombed.”</p><p>“I think it’s easier for the line soldiers to just ignore the planes. We can actually defend ourselves against them,” Hermione agreed, brown skin flushed with warmth. The days were heating up but the drizzle off the coast still demanded greatcoats, but, it was easier to work one’s self up to a sweat.</p><p>“That’s a bloody-minded way of putting it, pet.” She couldn’t resist the easily provoked flush as she turned back.</p><p>Still, Hermione had gotten better at recovering from it, over time. “What are trying to figure out, exactly, General?”</p><p>“Dispositions of the enemy tank battalion along Slug Road. I want to know if we should shift fires.” She had command over an entire division in a densely packed area at the moment, and Jorge—General Diaz--was preparing to bring up the second, but between the enemy withdrawal without fighting street to street in Aberdeen and the need to keep civil order there, she really only had about a brigade in position for this attack.</p><p>They were attacking anyway. Of course.</p><p>Hermione stepped up, smiled faintly, and put the paper down in front of her. “Well, you might pay attention to this for a moment instead. Just came down the wire.”</p><p>Bella’s eyes promptly flicked down to read. Her lover was also too assiduously competent of a staff officer to ever <em> not </em> pay attention to her suggestions, promptly. She read it, thought about it a moment-- “ The 6 <sup> th </sup> VDV Division took Rannoch on the Fort William Line”--Turned toward the map of the Grampians they had unfolded. There was a map but Bellatrix only glanced at it for the briefest moment to orient herself. Instead, the picture unfolded inside of her imagination. This was the talent she had been given. In fights where she had been on the front-line, wand in hand, fighting for Voldemort in the wizarding world, and when commanding entire Armies ten times larger than the one she had at the moment, it had all been the same.</p><p>She imagined it clearly now, like a symphony of chaos. Four divisions trying to cover the whole front from Aberdeen to Cairndow. Two of them had been in training, as reinforcements for Europe, and weren’t ready to fight. They had the strength of six divisions attacking them, with naval and air superiority. Half the enemy fought for pay, half for an independent Scotland.</p><p>But the independent Scotland of the Morsmordre was a savage lie, and every man in that force knew it at some level. Also, her Black Guards included in many cases their former comrades and countrymen. So they fought with skill, but cautiously. It was a defensive battle. Why didn’t they give up entirely?</p><p>Wizards, mingled in their ranks, being used more as Political Officers than as front-line troops. Less opposition for MinKol—they were suppressing their own people instead. So, the magic began to tell on them. Goblins coming down from the heights—no reserves left to face them. Can’t bring up supplies, the enemy bombs everything coming up from the rear. Give them a prepared position—they can hold it, for eight hours, for twelve hours, inflict heavy losses. The mortars run out of bombs, the guns out of shells. The tanks are down to a quarter tank of diesel. Fall back now, or never fall back at all.</p><p>The cracks appear. The symphony of steel plays across their positions. The artillery strikes down men with a statistical sense of the random. What are they fighting for anyway? Do the wizards really even fight for anything themselves? Would Duchess Narcissa Malfoy be a worse ruler than Lord Voldemort? Would she let Britain’s magical culture die?</p><p>Or is it just fear that Voldemort will win no matter what, that he can’t be killed, that defying him is a fate worse than death?</p><p>The fear seeps into their ranks—Bellatrix can feel it in her imagination—until the motivation begins to slip away. The VDV divisions are almost completely amphibious—Loch Ericht is a passage for them, not a hindrance—they’re taken on the flank. The reserves are out of position, they’re slow, they don’t want to brave the shelling, even if they’re fighting loyally they’re fighting <em> slowly. </em>The cracks become crumbles.</p><p>The line breaks. The men fall back. The Russians to the east, they’re in the flank of the position at Pitlochry now, and there wasn’t enough time to haul guns up to the tops of the mountains to cover the vales. The lack of transport in the Highlands is as much of a hindrance as a natural defensive line, they don’t have the time to prepare works, this isn’t 1915 on the Alpine front…</p><p>Bellatrix looks up from the paper, eyes distant. She’s aware Hermione is staring at her. “Are you alright, General?” At heart Hermione knows she’s alright, she knows Bella gets this way, she knows that the older witch imagines, viscerally knows the battlefield this way. That’s why she’s Bellatrix, gifted symbolically by her father to Andrasta on the day she was born. She can’t be any other way.</p><p>“1915 on the Alpine front…” Bellatrix muttered again.</p><p>“Avalanches,” Hermione supplied immediately by free association, and then continued: “In school they told us about the avalanches killing almost as many men as the fighting. Austro-Hungary against Italy, 1915-1918, the Alpine front. That’s what you were referring to, right?” Hermione, confident, composed in danger, bookworm to the bloody end.</p><p>The passes in the Highlands were still choked with snow. The cooling of the world would not end for long, long after the war itself. There were plenty of roads in the Mounth, gravel access roads, for logging, for farming, whatever, but they were there, eminently passable by tracked vehicles. She’d pinned substantial enemy forces here, and the furthest west she went, the more likely she was to encounter forces whose reserves were being pulled away to deal with the breakthrough at Rannoch.</p><p>“Tell General Diaz I want the 8<sup>th</sup> at Braemar, not here.”</p><p>“Understood.” No question—they understood each other now. Hermione glanced to the map, and wrote the grid squares with a flick of her wand, noted the highway number, went back to the radio.</p><p>“And get ready to apparate with me, Hermione! We’re going back to shake loose another brigade. We’re going to lead them across the Mounth south of Ballochan. These troops need only pin the enemy in place. They’ve lost the initiative, they won’t counterattack! We have them, we just have to make it happen!”</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Like a storm over the mountains, with wet, heavy snow magically dislodged before them in roiling avalanches down the slopes, they had fronted the Mounth and swept their way down the other side. The line had broken completely, the enemy could not hold, the enemy <em> did not want to hold, </em>not in the heart, not in the way that fired the kind of resistance that could stop such an advance.</p><p>They swept down onto the Firth of Tay in the days that followed, and took Perth against dissolute resistance. But by the time they had, troops were already converging on Stirling, and Hermione lived as she had at the best times of her adult life, sleeping in an APC, drinking tea boiled on top of an exhaust manifold, being tempted into a cigarette with the regular line soldiers. She was trying to avoid getting addicted again, but the rhythms of this life were so straightforward and so comfortable that it was hard, at best.</p><p>It was a forgetting, and she craved it. She was there at Bella’s side while Bella was being <em> her </em>best, too. In the lowlands all of the snow had melted, and it was almost May, anyway. The fields were wet and soggy and the mud torn up from the passage of the tanks flecked their coats. On they pressed, under slate skies and through drizzling light rains.</p><p>Their forces combined with the VDV divisions that had penetrated through the western highlands at the Keir roundabout, at the north end of the M9 motorway south of Dunblane. They’d dislodged a mortar battery which had been positioned in the woods to the southeast and Hermione was calling up air support from a orbiting flight of Su-24s on standby to attack a battalion of self-propelled howitzers that were falling back toward Stirling.</p><p>“<em>We cannot comply, III Corps Headquarters. We have been directed to a general operational halt in the eastern sector.”</em></p><p>“Huh. An operational halt?”</p><p>“The order came directly from Inverness. Over and out.” The channel clicked off.</p><p>Hermione turned to Diaz. “General, operational halt? Frontal Aviation apparently heard about it.”</p><p>“Something just came out now…” He looked up in surprise, but then, Bella appeared out of one of the command tracks, her greatcoat shaking loose and fluttering behind her like a cape. “General, an operational halt?”</p><p>“General Diaz, get an escort squad for me right now, I’m going to Keir House.”</p><p>“May I ask why, General Black?”</p><p>“The commander of the Scottish National Army has received a truce from my sister,” Bella answered. “No symbolic battle of Stirling Bridge to rally people to the colours. But we have to move quickly if we’re to seize the government before it reaches Glasgow.”</p><p>“Am I coming with?” Hermione asked.</p><p>“Of course. You’ll <em>have </em>to see this.” A grin. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>In the 1970s, Keir House, a fabulous lowland Scottish country house with an attached 15,000 acre estate and the residence of the Stirling family, had been purchased by some Sheikh. Someone in Voldemort’s regime had seized it, rarely used it. A few servants had very hastily packed belongings—or just robbed the place—in the past few days.</p><p>Now Bellatrix Black appeared with Hermione and a squad of wizards in a crack of apparation. They faced a group of grim men with rifles, and an officer with a staff of four, of General’s rank. <em> John Cowan, </em> Hermione thought, connecting intelligence files with a face. He looked sharply at Bellatrix, who looked back. Of course they had seen each other before, the commander of the Scottish National Army ranked well enough for direct interactions between them in the past, before Bella's defection. Now they stood together again, in the scattered remains of some rich Wizard or collaborator's life, in the faded remains of the excess of an age that was already dead.</p><p>Standing in a dusty and disorganised parlour, two groups from opposing sides. General Cowan waved and the rifles were lowered. “Secure the area,” Bellatrix directed, after checking her chrono, and then looked again to Cowan. “Just a minute now.”</p><p>“Of course,” he cleared his throat, watching as Bellatrix went through an assortment of spells, testing intent, testing for wards, testing for traps, testing for bombs.</p><p>Then it was time. Narcissa Black Malfoy appeared, with her own contingent of guards, and Lady Zabini at her side. She was dressed in a fine conservative style, not proper wizarding robes but something taken from Edwardian fashion which immediately marked her as a pureblood, and would still be more palatable to muggles than wearing robes. She smiled regally to the General, and spoke. “<em>Nid ydym yma </em> <em> i- </em> <em> dod ag annibyniaeth </em> <em> in </em> <em> Alban </em> <em> i- </em> <em> ben, ond </em> <em> i’ </em> <em> g </em> <em> o </em> <em> blhau men </em> <em> gynghrai </em> <em> n </em> <em> o genhedloed Brythoniaid.</em>” They didn’t know what she was saying, of course, since Scots Gaelic was nothing like Cumbric for those who spoke it, but Narcissa provided the translation at once: “I am not here to end Scottish independence, but to fulfil it in a League of the British peoples.”</p><p>She paused for a moment, and then continued purely in English. “I am as Celtic as the people of Alba, but these petty disputes between the peoples of these islands, when we are all one blood and kith and kin of this land and its power and nature, should be well done and behind us. I forgive you and your troops, General; you did what you had to according to the circumstances. I am more concerned about the government. I aim to seize the leaders and summon the Scots Parliament to hear my terms; and if we are to be successful, we must move quickly.”</p><p>He took a breath.</p><p>But it was a foregone conclusion.</p><p>“Of course, Your Grace.”</p><p>They would not keep dying for Voldemort. They would have to have faith in whatever Narcissa planned, for the sake of them all. Were they not, in fact, all of one blood?</p><p>Hermione smiled. If anyone could bring peace, now, Narcissa would. She had become remarkably fine with the idea of a future created by the youngest sister of the House of Black.</p><p> </p>
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<a name="section0069"><h2>69. The Plan of Falkirk</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was raining, because of course it was—it was April in Scotland. It was dark, because they’d only located the train hauling the Scottish Parliament west and forced it to halt at Falkirk. This Parliament, which had been elected under the auspices of an Act formed before Voldemort’s Coup d’etat, but the elections themselves having been controlled by Voldemort’s regime, had met in the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on The Mound in Edinburgh until the very last hour. They had tried to flee west, but the generous terms of the truce and the abrupt cease-fire had caught them.</p><p>The <em>Ministers </em>had used automobiles, trying to stay on the back roads and avoid detection, but they, too, had been blocked by advanced guards. Narcissa did not bother with them; she cared only for the regular members. The station at Falkirk High was a little brick abomination epitomising all the worst of British Rail from the 60s; the MSPs were herded into buses under the watchful eye of the Black Guards, and then taken to Falkirk Trinity Church. The stone edifice would have to be sufficient for the meeting that would be held at it; it was not too undignified of a place.</p><p>About a hundred and twenty MSPs were brought in. Their aides milled around in confusion and fear, in the outbuildings, the car park, and the other rooms of the church. There were armed guards everywhere. It was growing late, and only at length after making several requests, did someone in the occupying Army allow a brew-up in the Church kitchen.</p><p>She was a Colonel in Russian uniform—but of clearly British origin. Hermione Granger. And, of course she was a witch. Hollow, lean face and shortish kinky hair. Wiry muscles. Sad eyes of a deliberate intellectual that had been washed out to a veteran’s sharp stare.</p><p>2100 hrs. Colonel Granger stepped along the aisles, speaking quickly to a few of the guards. They came attention. The doors were opened.</p><p>Muggle business suit. Conservative. Like you would have worn to meet with the Queen before the War. Coat still on—one of the officers of the Guard takes it for her in a properly gentlemanly gesture. Gloves, those she kept.</p><p>Wand at her side.</p><p>Blonde hair, blue eyes, sharply patrician features. Taller than Colonel Granger by an inch or two. Hair perfectly coiffed, makeup perfectly done, clothes perfectly unruffled. Absolutely reserved. Absolutely controlled. Absolutely no hesitation. This is the woman whose military invasion of the British isles directed nuclear weapons against a mysterious and evil magical fortress—and in some alchemy of science and magic, raised a neolithic Atlantis back above the sea. She would be like a demigoddess returned to the British people, if she weren’t here in pumps with a wristwatch while her troops were carrying AK-47s and tanks were in front of the church instead of knights on unicorns.</p><p>Colonel Granger made sure the Guards were at attention. Narcissa Malfoy, the Duchess of Lancaster, walked to the lectern of the church. Colonel Granger steps up to her side. They speak for a moment; Hermione hands Narcissa a cup of water, and it ends up in the lectern so deftly almost nobody notices it. The gloves come off.</p><p>Narcissa begins to speak. She’s code-switching for this. She’s an aristocrat and she can never escape it, but she intentionally lets her accent, the accent of the long-dead Cumbric, come through. It sounds more disarmingly Welsh—like a Welsh aristocrat instead of an English one. “Parliament of the Scots,” she begins to address them. “I greet you on a day of general celebration: The Liberation of Scotland is at hand. Our troops even now move further to the south, with no significant resistance. When the physical liberation of Scotland is completed, the moral and spiritual liberation of the Scottish people will also be completed. This is no mere thing, but a breath of fresh air, the ‘winds of change’ which will allow people to speak their mind and participate in the civil life of their nation again after six years of terror, murder, lies, and repression.”</p><p>“I come to you plainly with my hands open to work with you. But I will also be honest with you. The elections to this body were conducted by Voldemort’s regime. The Scottish Parliament was implemented under a government under Voldemort’s power. You cannot say that you hold a popular mandate. You <em>very well know </em>that you were used to perpetuate the system of power within the Morsmordre regime. The independence it granted you was a farce, with a Gauleiter in all but name exercising actual power over your country, which had less liberty despite its nominal independence than it did when it was ruled directly from London.”</p><p>“I was given the power and authority to rule by decree throughout the British Islands, until a regular government could be restored. This power I would exercise with the utmost reluctance.” She raised her hand to quell any immediate response. “You would rightly observe that I am a Witch, and therefore of the magical world which produced Voldemort and his regime. You would be correct. However, the magical world also has the sixteen hundred year history of the Wizengamot, which was formed as Roman rule in Britannia began to collapse, as a body with rights of free debate and deliberation, which even when answering to a King, never bowed from its prerogatives. Voldemort destroyed our culture of participatory and deliberative politics and governance with the wizarding world, as much as he attacked that of Scotland, the British Isles and the world generally. I am coming to you from the parliamentary tradition of the Wizengamot. I fought against Voldemort before he seized Britain, and lost my husband to him then, at a time when in our world he was absolutely triumphant. I fought against him in exile, too, and now I return in triumph, because the spirit of the British people resists the imposition of tyranny.”</p><p>“I say British most broadly. You are Celts, and I am a Celt, too; I grew up in <em>Yr Hen Ogled, </em>The Old North, and the traditions of the wizarding-folk of these islands are the traditions not of Anglo-Saxon culture, but of a time when we were all the <em>Brythoniaid, </em>the Picts, the Gaels<em>. </em>The Anglo-Saxons came, and indeed, they changed all of us. They gave the wizarding world the modern name of our assembly. They gave a great swathe of our beloved native island a new tongue in which from convenience I speak to you. But they did not exterminate what made us British, they did not extinguish who we are as a people. In the end, the story of these islands cannot be unwoven. But I am not friend of the central power of London. I have seen, personally, the consequences of the central authority the Wizengamot held, when it was subverted. We all saw how Whitehall became the centre of Voldemort’s power, after a single night of terror and horror, and the British government’s own forms and systems were used to oppress its people. Therefore I do not come here to extinguish the Scottish nation, but to complete its revival. I will not end devolution: I will renegotiate it so that the land where Pictish blood still runs, will take her place as an equal partner in a League of British Nations.”</p><p>She strategically took a drink of her water, having impressed some with the perfect composure from which she spoke, from memory, so alien to a modern politician. Then she continued, her voice perfectly poised within the strong vocals of the church, the lights on the stained glass banishing the gloom of the night. “Honourable Members, <em>do not </em> waste the opportunity to help me define the future of the British <em>Nations. </em> You are here, where you alone, had some measure of freedom under Voldemort’s regime. This gives you the moral obligation to stand with me to realise the interests of Scotland’s people. The Scottish nation will judge in history whether or not you were bravely ameliorating the oppression of tyranny, or but a ‘Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, based in no small part on how you respond to my call of service today. I will be bringing forward a broad political plan for this League of British Nations. Your support before the Scottish people will allow us to make the first step toward fulfilling this mandate and reestablishing a government which will defend the liberties of our peoples, together, in our shared legacy. <em>”</em></p><p>“<em>Understand, </em>that first, there are shared matters of accountability for the crimes which occurred during Voldemort’s regime. I am well aware that most of you had little choice. But, to begin this new era, as I said, your mandate must be based on the respect of the Scottish people for your position. Therefore, you must be willing to adopt standards which will bind you, and result in prosecutions if the subsequent investigations demonstrate that any member of this body violated those standards—the definition that we will hold, which separates collaboration of a necessary kind, from criminal conduct. With these standards in place, I will hold my hand out in friendship to you, and constitute this body as a provisional house to affirm the place of Scotland within the new constitutional order, trusting that the majority of your number are men and women of character who acted as necessary to ameliorate conditions for the Scottish nation. Let us face this challenge together, and boldly. We have not run out of history in these islands yet: Together we may still build their prosperous future.”</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>After Narcissa’s speech wrapped up, Hermione was able to step out, while Narcissa worked to personally help with housing the Scottish Parliament, a gesture intended to establish her goodwill toward them quickly and immediately. Hermione understood how the game was played. Once, she had wanted to be Minister of Magic, after all, but whether or not that role would even exist as such in the future, no-one could say at the moment.</p><p><em>Honestly, thinking about the future was optimistic. </em>Voldemort was not dead, after all.</p><p>Instead, she made her way quietly through the rain to the parsonage. The lights shone brightly in the night. Because of the lack of opposition, mains power had not been disrupted, and the city of Falkirk still had electrical power. Most of the rest of her staff was there. She was handed a stack of briefings altogether much too high.</p><p>They had not attempted to enter Edinburgh or Glasgow yet, with the troops instead moving south and shifting around to hold the rail-lines and motorways between the two. Cut off communications, isolate, hold. They would control the distribution of food and enter the cities at will, but hopefully that Narcissa’s efforts would quickly bear fruit and see both cities welcome the arrival of the troops.</p><p>The coast from Scarborough to Teesside was rough and high, and so had been less impacted by the magically altered bottom conditions throughout the entire North Sea. Landings using a combination of Russian Naval Infantry and Royal Marines from Zabini’s fleet were therefore proposed, as well as a desant from a third VDV division (the Russian military only had enough airlift to conduct an aerial desant with one VDV division at a time, but two weeks was enough for the maintenance and regeneration cycle to have them prepared to deploy a different division). From there, they would cut through the North Yorkshire Moors boldly, taking advantage of the fact that at the moment the rugged terrain was undefended. From there, nothing would be in their way to keep them from reaching London and relieving the Goblins. It was a distance of 300km, without opposition it could be covered in two days.</p><p>With the surrender of the troops in Central Scotland, there were now only two divisions as serious opposition, one at Carlisle and one at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, hopelessly out of position with no real defensive line established. A third division could come over from Ireland, but Narcissa might yet prevent that from happening.</p><p>Jorge Diaz stepped up to her. “Here’s something interesting for you, Colonel.”</p><p>“Sir?” She took the telex printout. Then she saw it straightforwardly. It was a report of crowds of people in Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds who were refusing orders by the Morsmordre Government authorities in those cities to disperse. Between the Allied Armies in Scotland, and the Goblin revolt in London, even magical means of suppressing the flow of information had failed. The people of Britain knew that the game was afoot. They were coming out into the streets. <em>And blood will flow in rivers red before capitulation, </em>Hermione thought, grimly. She knew that the men Voldemort had placed in the occupation Government would not hesitate to switch to live fire. Indeed, the fact that they already had not was a sign of just what level of collapse and paralysis the Morsmordre government of Britain was already in.</p><p>She looked up. In that moment, anything could happen in the near future. “General, what could we actually do with this information, Sir?”</p><p>“Radio broadcasts of instructions. Either to encourage them to fight, or to encourage them to <em>not </em>fight, to avoid the pointless effusion of blood,” he answered. “Many people will have functional radios, we’re close enough, we have transmission towers to block out enemy jamming and counter-transmission efforts.”</p><p>“Actually, more than that, Bellatrix has a certain kind of magical talent…” She trailed off. <em>That was terribly familiar in regard to your nominal commander. </em></p><p>“I’ve heard the rumours,” Jorge acknowledged, then smiled faintly. “If you’re going up to her room, you should bring the report to her. It is ultimately her decision. Or even her sister’s. But she’s busy with the politicians, and she gave General Black broad discretion over military matters.”</p><p><em>If you’re going up to her room. </em> Hermione flushed. <em>Damnit. He knows. </em>“I… Yeah, I’ll take it up right now.” She tipped a salute to the Spaniard, and then headed up the stairs to the bedroom of the parsonage. The windows were filled with light from the bivouac of command vehicles parked around it; the parsonage was only the centrepiece of a corps headquarters, not the entire affair.</p><p>Hermione was shown through the guards with a nod and a salute, though there was a magical ward to alert against polyjuiced substitutes to those known and trusted; likely, there was a room reserved here for Narcissa, as well. She reached Bella’s room, and knocked on the door. It had once been the Parson’s. “Colonel Granger.”</p><p>“Come in, ‘Mione.”</p><p>Hermione smiled in spite of herself, and with the documents tucked under her left arm, all proper and regulation, opened the door and stepped inside, quickly closing it behind her. “Bella.”</p><p>Bellatrix had hung up her coat and jacket and even removed her corset; in a brassiere and a uniform skirt and stockings, with boots kicked off, curled up on the edge of the bed against the pillows—small, absolutely sultry, and absolutely in control of the situation as she tossed her hair back, and grinned knowingly when Hermione sucked in her breath. She held a goblet, and raised it cheerfully. “Communion wine.”</p><p>“...Bella!?” It wasn’t like Hermione was surprised Bellatrix was half naked in a parson’s bed with her headquarters having seized a parsonage, while drinking communion wine, <em>but...</em></p><p>Bellatrix waved her hand and briefly cackled. “You’re still so easy to work up. Relax, it hadn’t been consecrated yet. I’m not one to dare the power in rituals—without a good reason, at any rate. Wine or not, come, sit.”</p><p>“What… were you doing?” Hermione asked as she walked up to the bed, and sat on it next to Bellatrix.</p><p>“Well, to go to bed, you generally have to take off part or all of your clothes,” Bellatrix smirked, reaching for her wand and with a small motion, sending the papers over to her lap. “Hmm…”</p><p>“How, uh…”</p><p>“Hermione, you care about business first, always. You came in here for business, first,” she grinned, and leaned up to Hermione, and stuck her wand through her masses of hair against her ear, as she flipped open the documents. “And you’d feel guilty if I fucked you before reading the dispatches.”</p><p><em>Well. She’s right. I’d feel guilty if she fucked me before reading the dispatches. </em>“There’s risings in the cities in the south. Mass protests,” Hermione summarised.</p><p>“Hmm. Including Manchester,” Bella said thoughtfully, reading through the reports quickly. “Now, that’s interesting. What did you want my decision about?”</p><p>“It’s simple, really. We can’t get there in time to prevent a massacre, but we should be able to reach them via radio. We’ve captured some powerful transmitters intact and… You can boost them, if the enemy tries to jam them.”</p><p>“I <em>finesse </em>electricity. Punching through a bunch of <em>static,</em>” she sneered, “is a brutish task, better suited for a high-power transmitter than my magic. Hook it up to a nuclear reactor and take the safeties off. You’ll burn through. Send a team to the Darvel transmitting station, and another to Selkirk, that will be sufficient. We’ve almost occupied both and the enemy is too disorganised to stop us now.”</p><p>“You know the main masts in south-central Scotland?”</p><p>“Of course I do—radio is the only muggle invention I’ve ever cared about, you know that already.”</p><p>It wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough in the circumstances, so Hermione let it go. She offered a smile. “Be that as it may, we need to get the signal out, but we also need to <em>choose </em>the signal, do we tell them to fight, or not?”</p><p>“What’s your recommendation?” Bellatrix asked, strewing the papers away and going for more wine. “Are you <em>suure </em>you don’t want a glass?”</p><p>“I might be leading a convoy to a radio mast in the next fifteen minutes, Bella.”</p><p>“Just apparate.”</p><p>“While drunk?”</p><p>“I do it… Sometimes.”</p><p>Hermione sighed and shook her head and thought. It was not productive to her, but <em>oh-so-very-Bellatrix, </em> that they would end up with such banter leading directly into a decision which would possibly kill thousands of people, one way or another. But Hermione looked back, and thought. Once she would have shuddered at the prospect of asking those unarmed protesters to condemn themselves to death, to tyrannical impositions of torture by the work of magic and cruel humanity alike, massacre and blood in the streets. <em>Save it for us. Save it for the soldiers who know the risk. </em></p><p>But these people wanted freedom. They were out in the streets protesting of their own volition. They had made that choice, now, as the regime around them creaked and floundered in chaos. And their efforts could in fact materially aide in the liberation of the rest of Britain.</p><p>Yes, really, she had to harden her heart, but the choice was clear. “We should tell them to resist with everything that they have. Unlike Warsaw in ‘44, or Budapest in ‘56 or Prague in ‘68, we’re coming for them, as hard and fast as we can. And, what kind of message would we be sending to the Goblins, that we want to save the lives of humans, but not their lives. Aren’t they rightfully British subjects too? Hasn’t Narcissa as much committed to precisely that recognition for them?”</p><p>“Hmm… Goblins or muggles, Goblins or muggles…”</p><p>“Oh <em>God, </em>Bellatrix!”</p><p>Bella laughed. “You have the right of it, Hermione. There’s barely anything more to say. I mean, really, it’s obvious. The more who fight, the faster it’s over, the less people die. They can disrupt the organisation of any kind of real line of defence. So we’ll broadcast the message.”</p><p>Hermione calmed, softly shaking her head. She just had to remember that Bellatrix was constitutionally incapable of taking anything seriously, including life and death itself, even her own, but certainly also that of other people. The bed creaked under her as she leaned and shifted to rest against the half-naked older witch. “I know you have an Army to command. But there’s got to be some way for you to help broadcast it, if that’s what we’re to do. If they’re going to die, it needs to be as big as possible, paralyse their response, demoralise the soldiers who face the people in the street, raise the masses by the million. Help them to overcome their fear. Can you pour that kind of influence into the broadcast? I saw you transmit Fiendfyre through radar pulses, Bellatrix. What about the essence of Felix Felicis through a short-wave broadcast?”</p><p>Bellatrix sat her glass down hastily, and closed her eyes. “I can’t be in two places at once. And that’s a <em>potion. </em>Though, sure, there’s other charms that might … Matter.”</p><p>“A central studio?”</p><p>“If there are direct analogue links, yes.”</p><p>There was a knock on the door.</p><p>“...Yes?” Bellatrix looked up in barely disguised irritation.</p><p>Hermione looked to her and whispered softly: “Not happy with an interruption?”</p><p>“Hermione, by definition, is already in the room,” Bellatrix answered, “so it can’t be Hermione. Because I’m talking to Hermione right now. So, Hermione, anyone else is a bloody nuisance.”</p><p>“Bella…” Narcissa breezed in, done having done the metaphorical equivalent of putting all of the MSPs to bed like a den mother at a summer camp. She stopped. “Hermione. I see I…”</p><p>“You interrupted nothing,” Bella sighed and sank back on the bed. “Hermione and I were just discussing electrical magic, and emergency broadcasts. There’s uprisings in Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, and they’re spreading.”</p><p>“I got a copy of the wire as well,” Narcissa nodded, and moved rather deliberately to one of the chairs. “What are we going to do?”</p><p>“Punch a magical broadcast through encouraging everyone to be brave. Possibly magically. Encouraging them to rise.” Hermione looked steadily at Narcissa. “It’s the right thing to do. It tells the Goblins in London we’re fighting alongside of them. And if we generate a critical mass, we can cripple the country. It may save more lives than it costs.”</p><p>Narcissa folded her legs and regarded the two with that look she gave Bellatrix, that look which, even though she was the baby sister, made it come off rather like she was looking at a delinquent younger sibling. “What about Ireland?”</p><p>“What about Ireland?” Bella bantered back. “It’s there. So's Doggerland, now!”</p><p>“Stop being surly, I…”</p><p>“Oh shit,” Hermione saw it clearly now. “The Ulstermen. They’ve got guns. But we don’t <em>want </em>a resumption of sectarian violence in Ireland. It would be a <em>disaster </em>for the future, Narcissa, that you want…”</p><p>“Precisely. So if we tell the rest of Britain to rise, we have to make sure that Belfast and Derry don’t turn into a warzone between the Loyal Orders and the IRA. We’ll need to send a team into what is still technically enemy territory.”</p><p>And Narcissa was looking at Hermione when she said it.</p>
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<a name="section0070"><h2>70. People's War</h2></a>
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  <strong>People's War</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>“I absolutely don’t want her to go! That’s deep into enemy territory and there’s more than just Loyalists and the IRA there, that’s for sure,” Bellatrix exclaimed. “Surely we could find any number of potential negotiators?”</p><p>Narcissa rolled her eyes. “Bella, you’re not the one who decides. That will be Hermione. And she very much wants a future career in politics, it’s in her instincts and her talent. Well, I need a military officer who can also be a politician right now. And, she’s British to the core, and far more rooted in modern British society than we are; she understands the sensitivities of nationalism in a way most wizards don’t.”</p><p>“It’s not about her <em>ability, </em>it’s about the risk of being alone in the territory of the enemy, dependent on the goodwill of others,” Bella answered, but she didn’t get further than that.</p><p>Hermione had already heard enough. She sighed and held up her hand. “I appreciate it, Bella. In fact, I don’t want to leave you ever again.” Rising up, she promptly planted a kiss on Bella’s forehead. “But, Narcissa is absolutely right. I want to do this, and I have a reasonable grasp of the complexities in Northern Ireland. One of the reasons I treasure our relationship is because you’ve come to appreciate me as a talented witch, in a sincere way. Just like I convinced everyone… Before you defected, that it would be a good idea to support your changing sides, well, Bella, I want to have a chance to convince the forces in Northern Ireland to support Narcissa’s policies. It’s my contribution to this invasion, beyond just my wand.” A level look to Bella, a smile. “I’ll take care of myself. You do trust me, don’t you?”</p><p>She could <em>see </em>the dry swallow in Bella’s throat, but instead, Bella nodded once, sharply. “Of course I do. You survived when it should have been impossible. I want you <em>alive, </em>yet… What would I be, if I didn’t trust you to do that yourself? Nothing at all.”</p><p>“It’s okay to <em>doubt,</em>” a step forward, hands reaching out, folding Bella into a hug this time. “But I must ask for your <em>respect </em>when you do. You can’t help the doubt. But you can choose to let me pursue my own course.”</p><p>“And I do.”</p><p>“<span><span>Thank you, love. </span></span><em><span>Thank you, thank you, thank you.</span></em><span><span>” Squeezing tightly to the other witch, pressing them together until buttons pushing into fabric hurt. </span></span><span><span>The lights outside had dimmed, at least, and a spatter of rain was on the window of the parsonage. Hermione ignored it and focused on Bella’s warmth that she engulfed with her arms. </span></span></p><p>“It’s so hard to ever let anything go now. I don’t want to be alone like I was in Azkaban, ever again, even if it kills me,” Bella mumbled, and Hermione thought she might even be crying, as Narcissa politely turned away.</p><p>
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    <span>o, Hermione held her closer, instead. She pressed and held the older woman right up until the point where, leaning into her and hugging her closely, the two just toppled over on the bed. Above her, Hermione could hear Narcissa laugh softly. </span>
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</p><p>“I’m going to leave the two of you here. Hermione, you’ll need to leave with dawn. Two step apparation should get you there—I’ll issue the necessary orders to start arranging things. Be practical, and be careful, but understand also that I’ll be giving you plenipotentiary authority. Make whatever agreements you need to make to get control of the situation.”</p><p>“Understood, Your Grace.”</p><p>“<span><span>Nonsense. Here, in private?” Narcissa looked to them, smiling. “It’s Narcissa, always remember that. You make my sister smile, and shake with emotion, and cry, and speak longingly, all in ways I had given hope of ever seeing from her. You </span></span><em><span>are </span></em><span><span>part of the family, Hermione. There’s no need for reserve between us in private.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I…</span></span><span><span> Thank you. Is there anything else?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Yes, I will try to find an appropriate and safe escort for you, you should not have to execute this mission completely alone.” With that, Narcissa </span></span><span><span>rose, and with a smile, and secretively bemused smile on her lips, stepped to the door, and then showed herself out of the room, leaving behind her Hermione, Bella, a bed, and communion wine that Hermione really hoped was, in fact, still unconsecrated. </span></span></p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The sickening wrench of disapparation and the equally sickening apparation back to reality were never something that Hermione would fully get used to. Instead, it was something she had learned to <em>tolerate, </em>dealing with the feeling inside of herself, churning her guts, that wanted to lay her flat but that she had learned first from Hogwarts and then from serving in MinKol to simply power through. It would never be comfortable.</p><p>For the first time in a very long time, she did not wear a uniform. She wore, instead, the robes of a British Witch. Properly this might have made her an illegal combatant, but they marked her as the robes of an <em>Auror </em>of the Ministry before Voldemort’s reforms, for a thin fig-leaf. In fact, of course, the Morsmordre cared nothing for the laws of war and taken prisoner she would be in mortal danger no matter what. The gesture of wearing the robes was more important than any particular risk to her person, anyway. She needed to represent what was traditional for these islands, to represent Narcissa, at this point.</p><p>Ginny and Luna were with her. They were the ones who could be spared, and really in the circumstances, they were the best escorts that she could have. As her stomach settled out, she gave a nod to the other girls. Looking around, she could see in the darkness the Stena Line ferry terminal, essentially abandoned for the past week since the Army had begun to advance south from Inverness and air patrols threatened to sink any vessels making the crossing from Ireland to Scotland.</p><p>A man in robes stood in the middle of the abandoned food court, with an orange scarf tossed around his neck. “Hermione Granger?”</p><p>“Mister Styles?” She asked, invoking the name of her contact, who knew if it was real or not.</p><p>He stepped forward with a nod. “I have heard of you before, but I wasn’t sure if you had survived before.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>“Muggle-born exemplar and so on. And fellow Gryffindor.” A small grin, and he turned, and cast a Patronus, not a full one, but a lively spark of white light that danced around and raced up, to speak in a disembodied voice. Shortly thereafter, a group of four men in sweatpants and jeans and trenchers, trying to be nondescript and taking advantage of the rain, moved in quickly.</p><p>They stopped, and looked to her. Being a member of a Loyal Order—or the IRA for that matter—was mostly a man’s game in Northern Ireland. “Colonel Granger?” One of the men finally stepped forward, salt and pepper beard, lean and trim, though, with rationing, it was easy enough for anyone to be lean in even the British Isles these days…</p><p>But then, Hermione was no different. She stood up stiffly. “So named, Sir. You understand that I’m here on the behest of the Duchess of Lancaster?”</p><p>“I do,” he acknowledged. “We have been in touch with her operatives from the beginning, you know, Colonel,” he gestured toward ‘Mister Styles’.</p><p>
  <em>Of course they have. Narcissa uses every lever, and is ready for every eventuality. </em>
  <span>She would have primed the Loyal Orders to revolt, if made sense for them to do so. Now that it did not make sense for them to do so, she was having Hermione get them to back down. That was the way the game was played. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hermione moved to sit at one of the tables, with its 1970s vintage multicoloured plastic bucket chairs on swivels. Good enough, though. Setting down her pack, she took out a Russian Army ration, and nodded to Ginny, who sat with her and did the same. Luna stepped a few feet away, to take up a watching position.</span>
</p><p>“<span>Let’s break bread and drink tea,” Hermione offered cordially, gesturing to Mister Styles and the Loyalist men alike. “We’ve </span><span>come to the point where a meeting like this can happen.” </span></p><p>“<span>We’ve come to the point where you’re preparing to cross the English frontier,” the salt-and-pepper man chuckled. “You’ve come to the point of altering the whole world with magic.” He shook his head. “But if that’s what it takes to defeat them, that’s what it takes.” </span></p><p>“<span>We created, when they destroyed,” Hermione answered with a thin but proud smile as the ration heaters went to work, and water was boiled, in the cavernous dark waiting room. “We are going home, now. You are aware of the risings in Birmingham, Manchester, and other cities in England?” </span></p><p>
  <span>The men exchanged glances, salt-and-pepper shook his head in the negative. Hermione would not ask their names, it would be impolite in the circumstances. That Styles was one of Narcissa’s agents and had magic to confirm their identities and presumably had grown up a muggle-born from a family connected to the Loyal Orders was sufficient. </span>
  <span>So far only salt-and-pepper had spoken, and Hermione assumed that was by mutual consensus. “No, we’re not aware.” </span>
</p><p>“<span>There’s mass risings in the Midlands,” Hermione explained. “On top of the Goblin rebellion in London, all the Midland cities are rising. Right now, we’re beginning to make broadcasts, calling on them to fight. I will be plain with you, I am here to ask you to </span><em>not </em><span>fight.” </span></p><p>“<span>And why not? If the Midlands are rising, we can have a rising in the city within the day. We can halt Belfast just as well as a lot of civvies and leftist rabble can bring down Birmingham!” One of the other men in the group exclaimed. He obviously felt, as a member of one of the Loyal Orders, that he was not a civilian. Fair enough.</span></p><p>
  <span>Hermione leaned in close, small tin cup of tea now picked up in her hands. Her eyes glinted. “Mmmnn. But you’ll tear Ulster apart in the fighting.”</span>
</p><p>“<span>And that can be avoided, how?” Mister salt-and-pepper asked, sharply. “</span><span>Look, Colonel, you’re a soldier and I don’t doubt a veteran of active fighting, I can tell in your eyes well enough. We all know how bad it is on the Eastern Front. I get it. But we either stand for what’s right and we liberate our people, or we’re less than dogs. Why wouldn’t you want us to fight for the freedom of Ulster?”</span></p><p>“<span>...</span><span>Because I think that if you hold off, we can secure the freedom of the entire Island of Ireland,” Hermione leaned in. “If you move, you will lose your hoarded forces. You will also incite them..”</span></p><p>“<span>They’re traitors, </span><em>let them be incited.</em><span>”</span></p><p>“<span>...Into a savage resistance against the landing of British troops on this island,” Hermione finished, her voice flat and harsh like flint. “Come on. Think it through. </span><span>We absolutely are going to </span><em>all </em><span>hang if we’re held responsible for this war. The entire world sees us as the equivalent of Nazi Germany. Ireland—collaborated. Scotland—collaborated. Wales—collaborated. But England? Yes, England collaborated, England is where all of this </span><em>started, </em><span>where the Morsmordre rose to power. The entire world calls that Britain. If we don’t hang together, we’ll surely hang separately. The Duchess Narcissa has a plan to restore fair and equitable central government. If we don’t have it, I warn you, you will be under the power of the Irish government. If we can’t hold the entire thing together, why would we choose Ulster over Scotland and Wales? The strategic situation would require contraction, and contraction to a single island makes the most sense. But Her Grace doesn’t want that. She’s a Celt herself, she absolutely does not want to see the disunion of these islands. Supporting her political plan is the </span><em>only </em><span>way to preserve Union in any form whatsoever.” </span></p><p>
  <span>Salt-and-pepper sank back. </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I need you to tell your units not to rise in response to the radio appeals we’re unleashing now to conduct a rising. We couldn’t muddy that message in the broadcasts, we absolutely need the Midlands in arms. But I need you to preserve your strength, Sir. We can do it. The British Army will land here soon, but it must be on terms. Her Grace has full plenipotentiary authority from the Crown. Let her negotiate with Dublin. If you don’t, the reality is that the Wizards here in Ireland might well side with them in resisting us, and that would be a disaster. While they are not wedded to Catholicism and they are certainly not wedded to the Republic, they </span></span><em><span>are </span></em><span><span>generally speaking Gaelic in culture, language, and outlook. We want to negotiate and we want to present a united front to the world, for all of our sakes. I need your support for that. </span></span><span><span>Look, the rules have permanently changed, in a world where witches like myself are worth a battalion of artillery or more, it doesn’t make any bloody sense for the Government to be against the Loyal Orders. We’re dangerous just by being born. So if you conform to the Government’s interests now as represented by Duchess Narcissa, you give yourselves a strong position from which to secure the right to never be disarmed, like the </span></span><em><span>Südtiroler Schützenbund.</span></em><span><span>” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>I</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>t was the best concession she could give. In fact, the chance of disarming the Loyal Orders any time soon was completely impossible, but the threat of an insurgency was also less in the context of British wizard-folk being actively involved in muggle counterinsurgency operations. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>After a tense moment and some mumbled discussion, Mr. salt-and-pepper nodded his agreement. “</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>We’ll lay low for now. Best get those troops here quickly, Colonel. It can’t last forever.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>No, it can’t,” Hermione answered, and nodded, rose, and shook their hands. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Thanks for the meal. Russia’s finest,” he chuckled dryly. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Ginny and Hermione stood together as they left. The younger witch looked up to Hermione. “They’re not happy, you know.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yeah. They want to fight. Who can blame them? There’s nothing more humiliating than not fighting, when there’s fighting to be done,” Hermione answered. “We’re both Gryffindors, we both feel that.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Entire thing seems a little bit like a set-up, still,” Ginny shrugged, looking around warily. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>That’s because it was,” Luna interjected, appearing abruptly out of the shadows, her wand out. Hermione stiffened like a rod at the words, her hand involuntarily snapping to her wand holster and drawing it. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>To point right at ‘Mister Styles’, who was pulling off his scarf. He didn’t flinch, just staring at Hermione levelly, not giving an inch. “Not </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>that </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>kind of set-up, ladies.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Behind him, out of the shadows, a group of a witch and two wizards, accompanied by a man in a balaclava, arrived. They were not in the uniforms of the Morsmordre. Hermione flicked her wand in a small detection casting, silent. From it, she could not feel dark magic in them, either. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>The Irish Republican Army, I presume,” she observed curtly. Hermione quickly, very quickly, thought through the possibilities of what it all meant, and then smiled tightly. “Did you like what you heard?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Not just the IRA,” the woman stepped forward. “You can call me Aisling, Colonel Granger, and I’m here at the behest of the Irish wizarding community. This gentleman, call him Mister Connolly and that’s all you need to know, is certainly here for the IRA though.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>But you heard everything, yes?” Hermione repeated. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Yes, we did.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Alright, then you know there’s no secrets.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I wish I’d heard something about an Ireland </span></span><em><span>United and Free </span></em><span><span>in it,” the man’s voice cut in.</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Ireland United is implicit in our plans. I like to think we’re all going to be free, but that’s going to take some work and cooperation, Sir. Your country is considered collaborationist by the rest of the world.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>He was quieted, as Aisling blanched, and nodded tightly. “You’re right, and that’s right enough why we’re talking rather than fighting you. We have an invitation for you, in fact.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Go on.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>We’d like you to accompany us to Dublin. </span></span><span><span>You can meet with the Government without the Morsmordre forces on the island being alerted, we’ve made arrangements. And, they’re precious thin on the ground, anyway.” </span></span></p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Bella would hate me for this. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>But she could not pass up the opportunity. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Certainly.” Hermione started to think this has been Narcissa's plan all along--now the Irish thought they knew information they had not been supposed to know, but if Styles was really Narcissa's man, and she had to be to trust Hermione's life to him certainly, then this had been planned from the start. <em>A Slytherin's Slytherin.</em><br/>
</span></span></p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>They had risen in then Midlands, in the cities of the North, and it was a terrible thing. Bellatrix mostly ignored the reports that General Diaz received, but she heard enough to know that the Russian Army had found in York Minster more than a thousand dead bodies from the Morsmordre released nerve gas into the Church when people had gone there for shelter after suppression of the rising. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Six hundred had been found on the outskirts of Leeds, crucified. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Terror had not worked. It rarely did, when people found their liberation close at hand. In Manchester the working class districts fought back so hard that they put the IRA at the height of the Troubles to shame with the quantity of Petrol Bombs and ingenuity with which they were employed in this most deadly game. She had seen footage being smuggled out, and broadcast to encourage others to fight, now that some BBC stations in Scotland were broadcasting for Narcissa’s government. In front of Piccadilly Station at Aytoun Street, some of the desperate Mancunians had rigged a trap by dropping live trolley wire from the Metrolink onto the lead tank of a column, electrocuting the crew, and pinning the others behind it as teams armed with nothing more than petrol bombs and a couple of shotguns had attacked the column behind it from the buildings to either flank. There was nothing in the world like the percussive recoil of a tank’s main cannon firing into the side of a masonry building from a distance of ten feet, the building bowing and spalling segments of brick as the shell detonated somewhere deep inside. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Nonetheless, six tanks were left in flames. Videos like that were edited, though, to encourage resistance. They didn’t show that a team of Morsmordre wizards had arrived soon after, and butchered at least two hundred of the attackers. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She was trying to </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>reach them as absolutely fast as she could. She knew that the sooner she relieved Manchester—it was part of the fucking Duchy of Lancaster anyway!--the sooner she’d make Narcissa </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>happy, and the sooner she’d end this entire shitfest the sooner Hermione would be back </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Hopefully alive. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>That brought icewater into her veins. Bella’s head snapped up, and looked to the south again. She’d already taken Lancaster. The citadel had been thrown open for her—a good omen. The House Standard of Narcissa as the Duchess of Lancaster flew there now, centred by the Lancastrian Rose. Now her Army was at Preston. She was almost Merseyside, not much longer to Liverpool and Manchester. Since it was Preston in late April, it was raining and foggy. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>In fact, the Black Family Manor—Ancient House—was </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>less than fifteen</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> miles away from her command post. The situation was confused and fluid enough that she didn’t bother apparating to it. She’d like as not just prompt an enemy attack on the position…</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>...And she wanted to save returning to it for Hermione being there with her. Something about that just felt important to her. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The enemy had a brigade of artillery around Great Hill, to the south southeast. The shells were slamming down into the centre of Preston as her troops deployed around her to cross the Ribble. Tongues of flames leapt from the buildings, but Bellatrix, calmly in the middle of it, was unconcerned, waiting, thinking. A hundred things were in her head, anyway, though she constantly kept coming back to the urgency of the situation, but urgency was a devious mistress. She waited. A row-house three hundred feet away detonated with a 155mm artillery shell exploding in the middle, the walls bowing out as there was a single tongue of flame, a slap of concussive shock in the air, the roof ripped and flying into the air, billowing smoke joining the rest of the cloud that mingled with fog and rain. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They had pushed so far ahead that it was only constant air attack from the Morsmordre Air Force and that artillery brigade—probably detached from the Division trying to get control of Merseyside from the revolt—that were fighting them. There was no other significant resistance and of course there wasn’t, with Lancaster being thrown open for her, she had covered two hundred miles in the past two days. The decision to bypass and isolate Glasgow rather than trying to seize it had indubitably helped. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Diaz stepped up, tapped the wet shoulder of the greatcoat that hung from her, still a size too large. </span>
  <em>
    <span>I really should transfigurate that… Or maybe I like it that way. </span>
  </em>
  <span>The sleeves hung low around her hands like an old Russian Boyar’s. </span>
</p><p>“<span>General Black, we’ve got tanks across the two abandoned Rail bridges between the Main Line and the A6.” </span></p><p>“<span>Oooh, good.” She laughed and spun to face him. “Have they responded yet?” </span></p><p>
  <span>A brace of shells slammed into the school across the Serpentine, a lake in the Moor Park at the north end of the city, perhaps a hundred yards away. “Clearly not,” he observed sardonically. “</span>
  <span>We did get those two UAVs up that you requested, however.” </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Oh, well, that’s the important part.” Wand stuffed into the hair that spilled out of her cap, she made her way back to the maps, under an awning rigged from the side of a command track. There was hot tea and she took a cup, seeing the positions freshly marked. “Hnf. We’re less than fourteen kilometres from their guns, and they have a desultory presence of infantry at best. They’ve got to fall back now that we’ve crossed the Ribble.” </span></span></p><p>“<span>You might remember those guns Colonel Granger faced in Norway—the gunners kept engaging even at eight hundred metres.” </span></p><p>
  <span>B</span>
  <span>ellatrix grimaced. Diaz’s words about Hermione facing danger in the past reminded her of what Hermione might be facing right now. But she shook her head. “No, no. They’re losing and they know it. And, </span>
  <em>
    <span>they </span>
  </em>
  <span>haven’t been fighting to oppress and massacre a city. They could still ask for terms, and receive leniency.” </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>You think their morale is breaking?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Absolutely. They’re fighting out of fear now. You know it. You just don’t want to hope enough to believe it.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Fear. The only thing that would make her hesitate, and wonder if she had been a damned fool to defy the Dark Lord. The fear that he could not, in fact, be defeated. The fear that also made her, in the darkness night, wonder if she should have taken the offer of the beast under Ararat. It would make the Queen of Hell, but she could have at least kept her family safe.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Could have defeated Voldemort, then and there.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>An officer stepped out of the command track. “Generals, feed from the recon birds. They’ve started to fall back toward the A675.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix’s eyes snapped down to the map. Her mind banished the thoughts, she fixed perfectly on the task on hand. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Just where I want them. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>A gloved finger tapped the </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>map at the Belmont Reservoir. “Assemble the Ready Team now. Time for us to disapparate!”</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. The trick with the trolley wires was used to some success by the people of Budapest, fighting against the Soviets in 1956.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0071"><h2>71. Relentlessness</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Relentlessness</strong>
</p><p>The Ready Team was led by John Dawlish, a character if there was ever a character, a Gryffindor once trusted by Albus Dumbledore and assigned as a special officer to the Minister’s office who had ended up supporting Voldemort and surprisingly ineffective. After being wounded before the Battle of Hogwarts, he had been rehabilitated, demoted, and ultimately ended up commanding wizard detachments on the Eastern Front, where he had demonstrated some renewed competency. And then, perhaps surprisingly, some of his Gryffindor love of right had reasserted itself—or he just had flashes of competence as a human weathervane, Bellatrix wasn’t sure—and he joined the revolt in the Crimean. Bellatrix had not promoted him, but he was competent commanding a company-strength force of wizards in the Black Guards, and reliable enough for the job at hand with an element of his force, the rest dispersed through the divisions.</p><p>“Major Dawlish, you will provide cover for me,” Bellatrix instructed as she stepped up, looking over the team—sixteen of them. More than enough. “I’ll chain us there, I know the location personally.”</p><p>“General, a fair number of my people will be disabled by that…”</p><p>She sniffed. “That’s why there’s so many of you.” Bellatrix plucked her wand from her hair and ear and extended her gloved hand. Somewhere under the fabric and leather there was living enchanted gold, and it ached very faintly, to remind that it was April, in Preston, in the rain.</p><p>Bellatrix’s wrenching power was more than adequate to bring them all at once, though half were on their knees vomiting a heartbeat later. They stood on a hillside to the northeast of the Belmont reservoir. “Come on, Dawlish, get ‘em up!” She cackled, and stepped out onto a knoll to boost her tiny height. Raising her wand, she magnified the image to see the earthen dam holding back the reservoir, and the A675 running down through the valley between the hill she was on and Great Hill. The lead elements of the artillery brigade as they retreated were pulling down it…</p><p>And then a <em>Maxima Bombarda </em>slammed into the grass nearby, erupting a huge quantity of earth and rock. Bellatrix laughed. “The wizards with them had their detection charms up and ready. Good show. I said <em>cover me, </em>Dawlish! Get your rogues up and fighting!”</p><p>She imperiously flipped a <em>Protego </em>out that deflected the next spell, nonetheless, and then turned her attention toward the dam.</p><p>“Sorry about that, General! Quite sorry!” Dawlish had finished rousting his squad from the ridiculous chain apparation, and they quickly knocked up a series of shields that completely disspelled the incoming magic.</p><p>Completing a complex weaving, a smirk stretched across Bellatrix’s lips. <em>And now you get entertained. </em>The dam had a road across the top, sure, so aiming the spell where she actually wanted it was difficult. In a quick motion she jerked her wand down with the magnifying spell still on it, completing the beginning of the movement to call forth her next spell. “<em>Aquamenti inferior Deprimo</em>!”</p><p>A lesser Aquamenti, creating water from where the wand was aimed and not from its tip. Add an earth-shattering spell—the dam blew open and a mass of water appeared inside of it. As an earthen dam, it was liquefied immediately, not as dramatic as blasting it to pieces—less dangerous to the surrounding community than its immediate destruction, but the undermining caused a rapid flood, spilling down, water rushing through the creek, knocking down trees and shrubbery, increasing in force and speed, quickly threatening houses in Belmont. A quarter mile from the dam there was a bend in the creek, where it turned away from its nearest approach to the road. There, the force of the water moving around the bend quickly caused the height of the flood to rise and overtop the road, pounding around the foundations of the buildings lining the creek, and rising higher and higher still.</p><p>“Be ready to give them hell, Dawlish!” She snapped as the column began to slow. And then with a cheery wave, she apparated again, and appeared on the road before the column, with her left hand up in the universal gesture to stop, and her wand at the ready in the right, a smirk firmly set on her face. <em>Don’t be fucking idiots.</em></p><p>Two desperate wizards spun out of cover behind some of the howitzers to confront Bellatrix, as overcome as they had been by the entirety of Dawlish team on the ridge. Bellatrix laughed when she saw that one of them was Emma Vanity, the Slytherin Quidditch Team Captain in the mid-70s. <em> Once you probably thought this was going to lead somewhere other than a fight with Bellatrix Black next to Great Hill in support of a dying regime. </em></p><p>“Hey sweetie, why <em>did </em>you lose to Gryffindor in ‘75!?” she called out, and brought the woman up short. “Satisfied with your life so far!?”</p><p>The Brigadier dismounted from his truck, cigarette clenched in his teeth.</p><p>“How about I offer you terms!”</p><p>“Go ahead, Lestrange!” Vanity answered, her face a white sheet, her wand gripped firmly, but one could, at a casual glance, read that she knew she had no chance.</p><p>“I want to get to Manchester as fast as I can. Fancy switching sides? You’re artillery holed up in the mountains, not infantry and tankers butchering people in the streets, and the outcome is still in doubt. I think we can get you all off.”</p><p>For a tense moment there was silence.</p><p>Then the Brigadier walked forward toward Bellatrix, and dropped to one knee. “I won’t ask it as a promise for me, but can you give it as one for my men?”</p><p>Bellatrix smirked indulgently. “Done.”</p><p>Emma dropped to her knees.</p><p>Who would fight for Voldemort, given the choice?</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>When she realised that they were meeting at Croke Park, in the middle of the sections that were in the process of being renovated (or had been, before the work had been halted thanks to the demands of the Morsmordre war effort—she tried to imagine someone trying to explain to a Death Eater the importance of rebuilding a Gaelic sports arena and wanted to laugh), Hermione felt very much like her fate for the rest of her life—shadowy meetings in large closed public buildings—was some kind of karmic punishment.</p><p>Perhaps, in fact, this was what she was going to suffer for the rest of her life for falling in love with Bellatrix: Meetings in the middle of unfinished stadia with shadowy political figures. <em>Well, if that’s it, you’re pretty damned lucky then. </em>She cracked a grin, she couldn’t help it.</p><p>Portable lighting. Security guards. Nervous looking Irish wizards and witches in civilian robes. And at some plastic fold-out tables with plastic tablecloths in the middle—the Irish government. Hermione slowed, glanced back to Luna and Ginny. This had taken several days to arrange, but…</p><p>
  <em>Yes, they’re serious. </em>
</p><p>“Prime Minister Ahern,” she said politely. “I assume you have your cabinet here?”</p><p>“Colonel Granger?” He stood. “I understand you are here with plenipotentiary power, from the Duchess Narcissa, who is generally recognised as the British Premier.”</p><p>Aisling stepped up to the table from the right. “Aisling O'Croidheagain. You could say I’ve been selected to represent the interest of the Irish wizarding community.”</p><p>“Hogwarts?” Hermione asked tentatively. She was young.</p><p>Aisling shook her head. “Only some Irish families bother sending their children there. I went to Caer Wyddno School.”</p><p>“Lyonesse, then.”</p><p>“Karrek Loos, we prefer.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t know, unfortunately, I haven’t travelled there; I’m a muggleborn,” Hermione observed as she moved to sit, looking levelly at the woman. She knew that Caer Wyddno only accepted purebloods and halfbloods and many in the families of parts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and the Lordship of the Islands retained the right to attend it instead of Hogwarts.</p><p>“Well, things will change,” Aisling acknowledged bluntly. “I’m here to testify that the Taoiseach was under the Imperious Curse, despite the nominal alliance between the Morsmordre and the Irish government, until we freed him.”</p><p>He did look pale and haggard, as if he were only now coming to terms with what he could remember doing. Or rather, now had the power to regret them.</p><p>Hermione tried to be sympathetic. “Mister Ahern, it’s over and done, but I assume this means you have little time before you must act.”</p><p>He nodded.</p><p>“Tomorrow at the latest,” Aisling interjected.</p><p>“I admit,” Ahern began, “that a commitment to an ‘Ireland United and Free’ would make these easier to swallow.”</p><p><em>Was he really regretting what he had done, or was he putting on a show? </em> Hermione wondered for a moment. Perhaps it was just an act. He was a politician. <em>Does it matter? Sometimes, convenient lies are necessary. </em></p><p>“Ireland United. Ireland Free,” Hermione replied, focusing on the matter at hand. “Wouldn’t a union of Celtic peoples be worth joining?”</p><p>“Of course, I…”</p><p>“Is it any different than the EU?” Maybe, he was still somewhat influenced. But she’d take advantage of it if she could. “Look, I’ll be very plain with you, right now a billion people in the world see Ireland as part of the enemy. You’re negotiating with a government made up of people whose mother tongue was a Brythonic language. It’s the equivalent of someone from the Gaeltacht. Duchess Narcissa has no interest in exterminating her own culture. In fact, she wants to restore it in her native land—what the Welsh call the Old North, whose culture was preserved and maintained in the wizarding world. Her demand of autonomy for the County Palatine of Lancashire was a calculated gesture for her to restore the old Brythonic north. In another year, Cumbric will be taught in the schools of Liverpool and Manchester alongside English. Yes, this <em>is </em>union with England. But it’s union with England on even terms. This isn’t a return to the 19<sup>th</sup> century. It’s about the people of the British Isles seizing the one chance they have for the rest of the world to pick us apart as the pariahs who created Voldemort. They won’t care about the distinctions, and they won’t care about the question of who was right and who was wrong. To them, <em>we </em>are Nazi Germany. <em>We </em>are Imperial Japan. We can hang together or separately…”</p><p>“But the <em>Crown?</em>” Ahern mustered himself, and looked at her levelly. “I’d sign on to a Celtic League, even one including England, if Duchess Narcissa proposed to be the President, or the Premier with a President over her. But the <em>Crown? </em>The IRA will not stand for it. And we made our alliance with them already, in hopes that we would someday have our chance at liberty from Voldemort’s regime, and we’d need armed allies to do it.”</p><p>“Then,” Hermione sighed, “are we to see bloody war? The reality is that the Loyal Orders would fight without the Crown. The North, the very Brythonic areas whose Celtic culture Duchess Narcissa’s family long preserved, is one of the great bedrocks of support for traditional British monarchy. Sir, we are in the middle of main battle against a terrible and resilient enemy. Let us defeat him. If you wish to address the constitution at that point, there will be methods for it to be done.”</p><p>Ahern closed his eyes. “They’ll speak my name in the same breath as Valera’s.”</p><p>Hermione couldn’t but smile wryly. “Better than General Bellatrix Black, Sir. If we fail, they’ll speak her name next to Judas, and if we succeed… They might do it anyway.”</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Manchester. Less rain. More carnage. Columns of tanks and IFVs rolling down the M61 at high speed, damn all for what it did to the pavement. Bellatrix laughed--only inside, but a laugh nonetheless—at the thought of some MP trying to get them to slow down. Today, there was no caring for rules, just getting into position to win, as fast as possible. She was propped up on the back of a chair and the steel rim of a hatch cover, hair whipping behind her, looking out down the M61 as the BTR rolled at speed.</p><p>
  <em>Five and a half miles from Manchester City Centre as the Jackdaw would fly it. What are you playing it? </em>
</p><p>They were close enough to bring any Army in the world to action. They were sweeping out now to flank the enemy in the city centre, to get across the Mersey before the bridges could be blown. Not even the survival of people in the heart of Manchester, fighting for their lives, mattered in comparison to those bridges. The vehicles rattled and screamed, running flat-out.</p><p>Silence.</p><p>No attempt to slow them down. <em>Are they able to organise? Where are the tanks? Are they retreating? Giving up the Mersey as a barrier? Giving up luring me into the heart of Manchester to fight, street-for-street? </em></p><p>She had to accept the risk. Bellatrix had to get her Army across the Mersey. There were a lot of bridges in Manchester and the city centre was actively contested. Ducking down into the command vehicle, she swung by gloved hands over to the little fold-down map table. “Reinforce the column on the A6 and get the lead elements to turn onto the M602. I think the M60 bridges are a trap.”</p><p>“Understood, General!”</p><p>The engine was roaring, rattling, snarling. Metal and thin padding, transmission whining, diesel popping. They had run all of their equipment hard, and the Russian models which had been steadily replacing the British ones as they were destroyed in battle or wore out and broke were themselves worn third-line reserves. If it got her to London, it would do. She had never imagined, once, that she’d be so reliant—and so comfortably reliant—on muggle technology. She could already apparate to London in a heartbeat, but then she’d just be one witch…</p><p>...Alongside of an Army of Goblins, granted. Bellatrix tossed back her head and laughed. Cissy’s boldness was still entertaining for her.</p><p>They poured on the speed, reinforcing the drive down into Salford. There was an overpass directly next to Salford Crescent station. Some combat engineers of the Morsmordre had set the charges, and detonated them as the lead column approached. The Black Guards were quickly pinned down in trying to divert and force their way across the tracks, where they saw a level access to drive across the tracks, and through a parking lot, gain access to the highway again. They deployed there, and also to the northwest, to push across the tracks. A single squad of Morsmordre troops held the Salford Crescent station, but their position was extremely well-prepared, and they held up the better part of a battalion for fifteen minutes.</p><p>Beyond them, a group of tanks were moving into position across the A6. Bellatrix and her command group were soon halted behind the lines, pushing units into action. But this wasn’t fast enough for her. She tipped a smirking salute to Jorge. “Hold down the fort,” she instructed before stepping down from the command track with her broom—a moment later she was zipping around the armoured vehicles a few feet off the top of the concrete step barriers down the central reserve which tried to intermittently divide the heavily upgraded carriageway. She was at Salford minutes later, swinging down from the broom and diffidently acknowledging the salutes of a Colonel and his aides. A spatter of bullets hit the side of an APC by them, perhaps aimed at her, but a flick of her wand took care of the next burst with a brief <em> Protego. </em></p><p>The sun poked out from the clouds. Perhaps it was a good omen. She snapped her wand across the ruins of the bridge. Concrete erupted from the ground, the lone enemy wizard, some callow boy, went flying; tanks went flying with him. A second attack, a <em> Deprimo </em>as before, slammed deeper into the pavement. She shielded herself against the desperate shot of a tank shell, before returning to the attack. Seconds later, the main enemy force was reduced.</p><p>Gunfire from the southeast indicated that her forces were still on the attack there. But the sooner she demoralised the enemy, the sooner they’d break through. Wizards were challenged by the need to actually understand what they were repairing. Most of the time, this was inherent in the spell, and it made it easier to repair something because the nature of the magic itself was such that it held within it all of the information required for the structure, object or item to be returned to normal. In this case, however, it was a precast concrete bridge; it was not like Bellatrix was trying to repair a radio. She could <em> see </em>the tensors of the forces clearly and how the bridge had, before the charges had detonated, supported weight. Now in a dance with her wand, a thin yellow glow surrounded ruins on the tracks, and she guided the girders and then the deck back together and back into place, not as good as new, but as good as it had been a few hours before. It took about five minutes.</p><p>“<em>Let’s go!</em>”</p><p>A second battalion was quickly sent down Trafford Road to try and gain the Mersey. It occurred to Bellatrix that if they had not been able to get engineers there to blow the bridge in time, they might have just set the charges at Salford Crescent and then used it as a defensive position to fire into the flank of an advance down Trafford Road toward the Mersey. Inside, she had simply bowled through them—personally—and now they were driving hard toward the centre of Manchester. She could see signs of fighting in the streets down. Damaged and destroyed buildings, others burned out, and the bodies of muggles simply laying in the street amid the rubble and twisted and burnt cars. Once she would have snickered derisively at the muggles being so incompetent and disrespectful to their own dead as to leave them out like that, but six years of this madness had taught her that the real cause was the chaos, the fighting, the simple fact that muggle battle was too intense to allow for time to collect the dead. The very way she thought about the world had changed.</p><p>Pounding their way across the Irwell, it was done. Only intensive defences in the heart of Manchester could stop them down. They’d follow the East Coast Main Line southeast if nothing else. But instead of resistance, anything that might have stopped them, they began to encounter people.</p><p>Bellatrix, riding on the top of a BTR, didn’t know quite what to think when they cheered her. The throngs of liberated, celebrating their liberation; the British flags on the vehicles, the men grinning, as if now they got the recognition for their daring choice to follow her. The witch, who in that moment was a heroine. The witch who the battered and oppressed people of Manchester saw as the deliverance they had earned from three horrific days of bloodshed in the heart of the city, right up until the moment when only the barest of an hour before, the Morsmordre troops had abruptly withdrawn, and fallen back toward the south.</p><p>For every dead person she’d seen, a hundred were cheering her. They thronged the vehicles, slowing them down, until, with some very great dignity, an older man, who had doubtless been a bobby decades ago, until he had retired, came out in his old, 1960s police uniform. He stood at the intersection of Oxford Street with Whitworth street, and with gloves, whistle, and his hands, separated the crowd from Oxford Street, so the column of armoured vehicles could pass by. As they did, the crowd spontaneously began to sing Rule Britannia.</p><p>Bellatrix pulled back her left sleeve and looked at her golden forearm. She thought of the fact that, for all that they were muggles, Hermione’s parents just as well could have been in that mass (she knew they were not, but still, that was not the point).</p><p>Bellatrix snapped her sleeve back down. Perhaps it had been worth it, after all.</p><p>The radio crackled. The battalion heading down Trafford Road had crossed the Mersey without opposition. <em>Keep up the pressure. Hammer home the attack!</em></p><p>“<em>Forward</em>!”</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Dublin. The Oireachtas Éireann—Leinster House. The night before, the team of wizards led by Aisling, and Hermione and her group, had infiltrated the National Library of Ireland. Due to the state of emergency it was shut down, but of course, the government had secretly ordered the Garda—the Irish National Police, not really a Gendarmerie before the war, but something close to one now—to coordinate with them in it, while officially patrolling it against exactly the kind of attack they were now executing.</p><p>The buildings were all linked in an expansive national complex. The minds of the men in the Garda were swept by Legilimens regularly, but a number in the conspiracy had already allowed Aisling’s crew to implant subtle blocks in their minds, which a Morsmordre wizard would not expect to be inside of a muggle’s mind.</p><p>After all, they watched all the mudbloods in Ireland. After all, any politically suspect wizards were survailed. People like Aisling were purebloods, who were supposed to be reliable.</p><p>Narcissa Malfoy had offered them a deal they could accept, and so Hermione, Ginny, and Luna were wearing Garda Síochána uniforms as they stepped crisply out through the National Library. From there, it was as easy as one, two, three—they’d either be quick or dead. The witches cast disillusionment charms on themselves, blending in like human chameleons with the long Georgian hallways of fine old government buildings.</p><p>They slipped through the loyalist security toward a group of outer guards. “<em>Stupefy,</em>” Hermione spoke, her wand moving, barely above a whisper, as they realised the floor was <em> rippling </em>before them, just a bit too late.</p><p>They walked on, feet clicking on the tile. Up the stairs, quickly now. Other groups were moving, too, throughout the capitol and several other cities. Airfields, barracks, naval docks, police stations, outlying government offices.</p><p>Avery the Younger was the High Commissioner of Ireland, a euphemism if ever there was one. In fact, he ruled the nominally independent government with an iron fist. It was not a position of repute among the Death Eaters—he had received it as he had displeased Voldemort too many times. Indulging in the flesh after years in Azkaban, Hermione had sickeningly heard from the Garda officers the horrifying kinds of games that Avery liked to play with muggleborn girls.</p><p>This seemed like it was going to be straightforward. In a properly executed coup d’état, one seized the government without a single shot being fired. That might even be true here…</p><p>But Hermione damn well knew there’d be no way to avoid a duel. The tension her friends and the Garda officers felt might be over whether or not they’d be found out too soon. But the tension Hermione felt, as the most skilled witch there, was over what would happen when they got to the room.</p><p>Stairs, offices, hallways. Adjusting the disillusionment charms for the setting, keep going. There was the cabinet briefing room. The Irish cabinet had, to the credit of those who composed it, volunteered to serve as bait, to get Avery away from the medieval tower house of Ashtown Castle which he had made his residence in the city.</p><p>A small body of picked Janissaries was there, Avery’s security detail. Again – <em> “Stupefy,</em>” from three voices instead of one. Then they <em> raced </em> forward. There was one junior wizard on guard detail—Luna turned toward him, as he realised that he was facing living objects and not madhouse floors. Casting a true-sight spell, he tried to get the drop on the blonde witch, but she was faster. His wand went flying from him with her sharp <em> “Expelliarmus!</em>”</p><p>But unlike in the days of Dumbledore’s Army, there was a Garda man ready to rush the distance, and make sure he didn’t get his hands back on his wand. In a brief struggle of man and wizard, the physically fit officer had the advantage.</p><p>Then the garrote he snapped around the wizard’s neck make sure he kept it forever.</p><p>By that point, Hermione had already thrown herself into the chamber. <em> “Protego rebounda</em>!” It sent Avery flying away as he made a play for Ahern, with the other ministers pulling the Taoiseach away until some of the Garda men dragged him out of the room.</p><p>Avery pitted a quick <em> Sectumsempra </em>against the shield, but it rebounded and he had to shield from it himself. The shield held together long enough to cover the retreat of her ‘bait’, and then Hermione stood alone.</p><p>“The fucking Hogwarts Mudblood Queen herself.” He chuckled darkly. “I’ll fuck you up like all the other bitches.” He threw himself over on the attack immediately. “Won’t you like that, dearie?”</p><p>Down right, drop your knees, cant the wand up left… Duelling spell after spell, trading shield and curse and jinx, flew from Hermione’s wand and matched the Death Eater blow for blow. For a moment, the magic caught their wands together, and Avery looked discomforted at the grin that Hermione had as they leaned in and forced the power in the cores of their wands against each other in a momentary stalemate, like two duellists with their swords locked. “I’ve already got one Death Eater in my life, I’m not interested in a second. Aren’t I little <em> old </em>for someone who rapes eleven year olds, anyway? Y’inbred shit.”</p><p>Avery stared at her, her casual comment, in confusion and shock. In truth, Hermione hadn’t planned on weaponising her relationship with Bellatrix like that, but in the impulsive heat of the moment, it was one more way to stay alive.</p><p>Then Ginny dropped in through the fire exit. Avery staggered back, barely able to shield against her quick attack as Hermione used the opening to hammer him into a wall with a combination of five spells in short succession.</p><p>Then Ginny kicked a chair into his legs. He staggered and fell. “Gotcha, sick fuck!”</p><p>Hermione sent his wand flying with an “<em>Expelliarmus!” </em></p><p>And then it was over. The two witches looked at each other. “Didn’t Death Eaters used to be harder than this?” Ginny asked, watching as Hermione stepped up to the man, grabbing him and hauling him to his feet, wand at his neck.</p><p>“Maybe we’ve gotten better at this. Comes with practice.” Hermione grinned tightly.</p><p>But Avery the Younger was grinning blackly at her, despite the blood and bruises on him. “Yer Death Eater, huh? Signed up to the Black-Malfoy Treason Train, did yah? Well let me tell you something about that.”</p><p>Hermione’s brown eyes bored into him with a tightening expression, skin paling. She grabbed at his collar. “What. Are. You. On. About?”</p><p>“Azkaban,” he laughed until he began to choke from her grip. “Just so you know, we all celebrated. Impressive bit of ritual magic. Shows the Black Bitch’s talent very well. Those fucking triple sisters from Hell. Raised a dead, sunken land back up from the sea? Makes a lot of people like all these traitors you’re working with assume they can actually win, I guess. But did they tell you the price that you paid for it, mudblood? Oh I’ll tell yah.”</p><p>“Don’t listen to him, ‘Mione!” Ginny shouted.</p><p>“What?” Hermione whispered.</p><p>“We used Azkaban as our own prison, little missy,” he grinned. “Dumbledore’s Army and the Order of the Phoenix? Light Aurors? All of them left were there. You killed them when you nuked it for Narcissa Malfoy and your Black Bitch. I bet the bitches like it that way. Removes any resistance to whatever regime they’re planning when this is over. Delusional, of course. The Dark Lord will win. You can’t stop him. You can’t kill him. It’s impossible. But, I have to admit as a Slytherin, it’s pretty clever. Make yourself a hero while removing the rivals who might ask questions about why the new government is filled with Death Eaters just like the old one.”</p><p>Hermione’s face was pale, and if it was rage, and if it was horror, it almost didn’t matter.</p><p>“I can testify about the disposition of the prisoners… I know names of who was still alive… I’ll testify about all of it. You can use it to move on them with the Russians. They don’t <em>really </em>care about Narcissa and the Black Bitch, they’ll support any other government. Heard you were ambitious, Muddy. Launch your own coup d’état. I bet the Chief Muggle down in Australia will be happy enough to say you’re Premier, next…”</p><p>Hermione roughly kicked him into the wall. <em> “Accio pistol!” </em>She caught it in midair with her off-hand as it flew toward her wand; she didn’t hesitate, her hand was already in motion on the trigger, she didn’t really aim.</p><p>A spray of bullets tore through Avery as he slipped down the wall in a growing pool of blood. Hermione emptied the full magazine of the PMM—twelve rounds of 9mm Makarov—and only stopped, with a frozen, empty expression on her face, when her finger clicked over an empty trigger.</p><p>Ginny watched her friend silently.</p><p>Aisling leaned in, and looked at the scene. Hermione turned toward her with a blank expression.</p><p>The Irish witch hesitated for a moment, and then smiled with a jaunty bloodthirstiness, her Gaelic lilt echoing around the wrecked furniture and slumped body in the Cabinet Room. “Right. Shot while attempting escape.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0072"><h2>72. Britannia</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Britannia</strong>
</p><p>York Minster. Gained intact but now with tragic legacy after a short battle on the outskirts of York—close enough to Marston Moor to matter as an anecdote of history—while the main column speed south. It was shaping up to be a fine spring day, though the snow still clung stubbornly in patches here and there to the heights to the north and west. And in York, it was time for a funeral. Narcissa Malfoy’s thoughts flashed back to the night she had helped save Brest from nuclear attack. It had soon become clear, later on, that they had been dupes of Voldemort, protecting the cities he wanted saved as he executed his plan to preferentially cull the muggle population of the world in a way that suited his objectives. But, she had still saved the city. Without the participation of the wizards and witches, it would have certainly died. That was objective fact, and nothing could take it away from her, or anyone else. Now, today, she had arrived too late to do anything about the massacre here in York.</p><p>They had prepared graves in front of the Old Palace. She could see there an Orthodox Chaplain of the Russian Armed Forces, speaking with a Catholic and an Anglican Priest. While the men spoke, Narcissa quietly walked along the rows of body-bags. At each one, she tapped her wand with a very gentle motion, calling out a measuring spell. Once upon a time, in the most ancient days, magic and religion had been blurred together, and a witch and a priestess were something of the same mark. Walking through the rows of corpses, gassed by the Morsmordre, Narcissa felt very close to that legacy.</p><p>The coroners’ services and other functions of statehood had broken down in the rapid advance. The usual need to bury people quickly was dictated by the need to avoid disease and rot, and here it was, too. When she reached the end of the row, the Anglican priest stepped over.</p><p>“Your Grace…”</p><p>“I’m just honouring them my own,” she murmured, blue eyes flicking over the man. “As my family has followed the old Gods of these isles for as long as we have lived. But I harbour no disrespect for Jesus of Nazareth. Measuring them for their graves should not impose, but for any whose hearts were inclined to our old ways, might bring them a measure of peace.”</p><p>He thought for a moment, and then quietly nodded. “You’re right, Your Grace. They come from many different faiths and backgrounds, no doubt… Will you say a few words of your own?”</p><p>“Of course. I will, when I am needed.” Narcissa wandered away, then, to the crowd of silent people, mostly dressed in black, residents of York, liberated, but now facing the cost of that liberation. Narcissa knew, too, that her design to exhort the people to rise had been the direct cause of this massacre, but that was the price of command. Now she went to face their grieving relatives, because that, too, was the price of command. She was not a warrior on the front line like her sister, but in a way her responsibility was far more terrible, and on that day, she drank it like a bitter drought, and forced herself, in a measured pace, and quiet calm composure, to be reminded of the consequences of her actions.</p><p>
  <em> Remember thou art mortal. </em>
</p><p>There was an older woman with her white hair in a perm, held firmly under a black headscarf, the kind one would wear to Church on a sad day, or a funeral, and today was a funeral. Narcissa adjusted her own cloak and hood. The woman had two young children with her.</p><p>One of them brashly spoke to Narcissa. “Grandmum says Mum and Da aren’t coming back, you were there, do you know?”</p><p>Narcissa stopped walking. She turned, and smiled sadly, and gently, as she dropped to her knees, without a thought, into the dew of the morning grass. Her wand tapped – created a magical forest of glowing trees, sketched a river through it, and brought some sweeping birds along the river into the air above the forest. “Not for a long time, my young friends. But when you hear the wind whistle in the oak and ash, and when you hear the water of a brook patter over the stones on the banks—when you see a bird dive in the sky, you will know they are not far away, even if they can’t come back.”</p><p>She watched with a small smile of relief at the children, eyes wide, naturally excited, and in wonder, at the magic which made others in the crowd press closer. This was the wonder of magic, simple, and really not much more sophisticated than some things that muggles could pull off, and yet so intensely part of the natural world, comfortable and approachable, for the sake of a child.</p><p>Then she rose, tears were threatening at her eyes and she didn’t want the children to see them. Tears were threatening at their grandmum’s eyes, too. “Thank you,” she said, softly.</p><p>“I’ve known loss as well,” Narcissa said, stepping away quietly, and leaving enough magic for her little diorama of a magical forest to linger for the funeral, as she turned back.</p><p>Of course there was a group of officers coming up. She could not leave command or leadership behind now, and even what she had just done was an act of it. As Regent (though she really did intend to arrange for the appointment of another after arranging for regular governance—but it would have to be someone she could control), they acknowledged her with salutes.</p><p>“Report,” Narcissa said narrowly—feeling a bit like words were a waste of energy in that moment.</p><p>“The Irish Government has revolted from Voldemort’s regime, Your Grace.”</p><p>Narcissa closed her eyes for a moment. “Including magical elements? Successfully?”</p><p>“Yes, Your Grace.”</p><p>It was not exactly what she wanted. However, while they were some disadvantages to it, in general, she could still see a path to what she wanted. And, it was a powerful blow, demonstrating an end of support generally for the enemy regime in the islands. “Well, well, Granger, who dares, wins,” she murmured to herself softly. Nothing else, after all, made sense.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>In her life, Larissa Sergeivna had never really expected to spend so much time in Britain; perhaps to visit it, though the Ministry of Magic and its administration had an unpleasant reputation, and so she had never thought much of it. But now she had lived here for weeks, and fought here, alongside the British and her countrymen alike.</p><p>And Draco Malfoy. He was with her still, while they stood on the roof of the train station in Doncaster, looking down at the snarl of tracks to the south and the west as flames and flashes and columns of smoke rose to the southeast in the direction of Bessacarr.</p><p>The enemy was in retreat from Doncaster, and Draco was covering her, shielding them from attack—and protecting the station by extension—as two Morsmordre fighter-bombers attempted a fitful raid. By this point as a veteran, not even coming under direct air attack with eight cluster bomb dispensers aimed at her bothered Larissa that much, and, she had come to trust Draco.</p><p>Ahead, the enemy was attempting to fall back, and that made Larissa’s duty here, standing all exposed, very clear. She was the one trusted to do this, with her skill in the black arts and the needs of the situation. And so she waited, and let the enemy attacks be dealt with by Draco, until she saw a significant force, screened by the tanks, their turrets pointing to the rear, passing into the large southern rail yard at Doncaster.</p><p>She raised her wand, and let loose with <em> Fiendfyre. </em>Controlling it, shaping it, directing it with her will across the open space down the broad way of the East Coast Main Line, she flung her power on a curving course that intercepted with the tracks on the curve, the massive curved yard, blasted through a train shed with a roar of explosive power in the distance, and based over the retreating elements of an already savaged brigade with the intensity of a firestorm.</p><p>Tanks flashed over into flames. The sudden rise in heat caused fuel tanks to detonate in BLEVEs, engines to catch on fire through the exhaust, crews baked alive inside through the air intakes, meant to filter gas and radiation but unable to filter <em> heat. </em>Rubber treads bursting into flames around them, leaving slagged tank bodies with seared paint slumped down across the yard, now set with smouldering sleepers and bent spaghetti of rails.</p><p>An engineering crew of wizards—such a thing to imagine as that, but it was so, the war had made it so!--would set the main line right by the next morning. She finished out the Fiendfyre with a shudder of intensity in her body, veins bulging and harrowed, haggard look of skin that hung on her.</p><p>The past year of the war had not treated Larissa well, but she was a superb warrior, would settle for nothing less than to be here, and expected that Haldi still blessed her. That was enough. Their own vehicles rushed into the gap.</p><p>“There’s nothing between us and London now,” Draco declared, then looked to her with discomfort in his eyes, and worry, too. “But I think you’re killing yourself, Lara. Let’s get to cover.” He reached out, took her by the hand, and apparated, frankly worried she’d just fall down the roof access ladder if they tried it, and wanting to get her back to a camp.</p><p>She was hardly the only person in this war destroying herself, though. Larissa felt sheepish at the way she had to lean into Draco while they reappeared at Pontefract Castle, and she had to steady herself and avoid from vomiting from the effect of sidealong apparation, not like there would have been anything on her stomach after eight hours of hard combat, anyway.</p><p>“We’ll have London tomorrow, Lara,” Draco said with firm gentleness. “Get some food, get some tea, sit down.” He eased her onto a camp chair, and fetched it himself. The days when he thought that was beneath him were long gone. At the same time, he summoned a mediwitch, and distracted Lara with the food and tea while the mediwitch quickly looked her over.</p><p>“Councillor Naryshkina,” the woman said. “Your magical core is essentially depleted. I understand you volunteered to be one of the fiendfyre attackers at Doncaster. That spell is one of the most exhausting in the world. You must not repeat it, for some time.”</p><p>Larissa sank down, feeling far too comfortable for how bad off they were telling her that she was. It was a kind of enervated moment at the end, the edge of one’s limits, where there was no energy to go on. <em> Comfortably numb. </em>She laughed, at the reference to the song lyrics.</p><p>“Lara?”</p><p>“Oh, Draco, just… Something your aunt would probably get,” she yawned. “I won’t ask to be taken off the line. Not yet. We’ll be to London by tomorrow. A union of the western and eastern thrusts. We’ve broken through the last organised opposition. General Black is already to Birmingham. The sooner we take the country, the sooner it’s over, your nation will be intact, your people free, when we have London, I can rest. We won’t have defeated Voldemort, but we’ll have crushed his power to take on the entire world, put the world’s most intact industry into our hands, instead. We will win. This is the beginning of the end. And I must be there, I must. Fuck, I’ve got nothing but this war—I have to see it through.”</p><p>All abruptly, not caring for the bit of tea that sloshed, Draco reached out and gave her a hug. Perhaps she did have more than just this war.</p><p> </p><p>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>When they blew across the M25 and roared inwards toward London, Bellatrix felt almost entranced by the sprawl around her. <em> What hath muggles wrought? </em>There was smoke from the city centre—the Goblin rebellion, no doubt—but with no nuclear weapons having fallen, no sustained combat, the immense urban sprawl of London was perfectly intact. At Northolt down the A40, the only sign of the enemy was a single flight of Typhoons, abandoned on the tarmac. Perhaps their pilots had defected, or fled.</p><p>Ahead, by Park Royal, she observed idly as surrendered troops were being rounded up by her Black Guards. They had given in—capitulated. Their limits of resistance were gone. The enemy Armies in Britain had been broken. And finally, at London Paddington, they came up to the forward element of their own troops, with a detachment of Goblin rebels drawn up across from them.</p><p>She leapt down from her command track. The city around was intensely silent, almost disquietingly so. One of the Goblins stepped forward, and flipped a casual salute, in imitation of the human style. “General Black, of the Lancashire Blacks. The commander of the London garrison is at Little Venice, but refuses to surrender to us. Come?”</p><p>“I will,” Bellatrix agreed, and started off on the short walk, as her troops fanned out, roughly approximating a line of delineation along London Street and the Paddington basin. They cut through the station, and it seemed odd to see one of these bustling muggle places so absolutely silent and abandoned, but still pristine and looking untouched by war, or the rebellion.</p><p>They crossed to Warwick avenue just before Little Venice. A pathetic, exhausted knot of men who knew that they were beaten stood there, in the park beside the basin that served as a junction between three canals, with its picturesque little island within it. A few canal boats floated above water, there was no sign of fighting here. The Goblins had not gotten this far before resistance had collapsed, and neither had the Black Guards.</p><p>It was over.</p><p><em> What was the name of this place, what </em> is <em> the name of this place? It will be famous, someday. </em></p><p>Rembrandt Gardens. Bellatrix wondered if it had anything to do with Rembrandt, actually, or if it was just some stupid muggle name. Lucas Nott was standing there, with Pius Thicknesse in hand. He stared at Bellatrix with a blank, apoplectic fury, made all the worse for the fact that it was totally helpless, that Bellatrix had <em> him </em> in <em> her </em>power, that the traitor had triumphed.</p><p>“I would have terms, Black!”</p><p>“Why didn’t you ask the Goblins for them?”</p><p>“What kind of wizard surrenders to a Goblin!?”</p><p>She laughed and shook her head. “Well, you’ll just surrender to me instead, and that doesn’t seem to make you any happier!” Bellatrix took some pleasure in the situation, in the look of blank and bitter despair that was on Nott’s face. Then she shook her head. “Here are your terms: Surrender at discretion, for all forces in the Great London area.”</p><p>“I’ve released Thicknesse from the Imperious curse,” he answered, as if that mattered for <em>anything.</em></p><p>“So? He’s a wanted man,” Bellatrix shrugged. There was a rather large and growing contingent of Goblins behind her. They had wands. She wasn’t afraid in the slightest, at least, for herself. Nott and his command staff who had arrived to negotiate their surrenders, might as well all go hang for all that she cared. A grin slowly formed. “Would you rather fight, Nott? A little scared?”</p><p>“Traitor…”</p><p>“Oh no you don’t!” They both ignored the shaking Thicknesse. Bella cackled again, laughing, and laughing again. “I am the loyal one, loyal to Crown and family! So have it your way.”</p><p>Letting go of Thicknesse, his bluster fading into just how broken of a man he was, abandoned by His Lord, as he felt it, to take the fall for the loss of Britain—Nott stepped forward, and quietly presented his wand.</p><p>It was finished.</p><p>It turned out that they had been organising the battle against the Goblins and temporarily running the Government from inside of Kensington Palace nearby, so Bellatrix headed south with the Goblin commanders and her own, and called for Narcissa, as over the next several hours, the surrender was completed, and the guns and wands alike fell completely silent around London.</p><p>An hour later, well on into the evening, Narcissa arrived with a picked guard of Russian and British wizards and witches. Bellatrix was summoned out to the Orangery, where Narcissa was already speaking to Jezakard Gringott. “I should like the Tube running by tomorrow morning’s commute. I just issued an order for a dawn-to-dusk curfew, but we are instructing all workers to go to work, even though gatherings of more than twelve persons shall be banned even outside of curfew,” Narcissa was explaining to the Goblin commander. “I would hope you would turn your skill at magical metal-working to quickly repairing all the damage to the track and lineside infrastructure. Then, I would like the Overground running by the day after tomorrow. Then, on the second, I want the East Coast Mainline to resume working from King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverley, though I know there will have to be speed restrictions. Yes—I understand that it will have to be with diesels; we’re making arrangements. Your people will be paid on the hour at craftsman’s rates.”</p><p>“That concerned about the railways, Cissy?” She was impressed at her baby sister, really, the leader of them all. She’d barely been at Kensington for fifteen minutes, not even long enough for Bellatrix to sort herself out and come down, and Narcissa had already turned it into her command post for organising the city.</p><p>Narcissa turned to face her. “It’s about letting the people of Britain know that this is over, and the Government has full authority,” she answered mildly, and calmly, but with iron in her voice. “Also, I want people out in the sun, able to travel about by rail, for May Day, as is their right.”</p><p>“Oh Gods. It is the twenty-ninth today, isn’t it? Tomorrow is the Ysbrydnos of <em>Nos </em><em>G</em><em>alan Haf, </em>isn’t it?”</p><p>“Tomorrow night, yes. I’d say it’s very auspicious, Bella. Speaking of which. The Chiefs of Staff can report directly to me, and handle the occupation of London. How about you return to Ancient House?”</p><p>Bellatrix grimaced. “You… Don’t want me here, Cissy?”</p><p>“The government is mine, the responsibility is mine. It’s not that I don’t want you here; it’s that I must be cognizant of publicising the relationship between us in a careful and thoughtful manner which very much emphasizes that you are no influence over my Government. Also, I want you to get Draco and Larissa Naryshkina out of the city; they have grown close, but she needs, urgently, to rest. I don’t want them involved in the occupation. Get them back to Ancient House. You can, by all means, act in my stead in Lancashire. And, the situation in Ireland is under control. I will cable Dublin and have Hermione join you.”</p><p>“And what about you, Cissy…?”</p><p>“I have secured my country and my family. I will celebrate <em>Calan Haf </em>with the whole British people,” she answered, with a smile of pain and perseverance and genuine happiness. “Take care of Draco for me. Rest. You have earned it, sister-mine. This is what <em>I </em>chose. It’s <em>my </em>time now.”</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Bellatrix led Draco and Larissa out of the Floo. Mardy the house-elf was already there. The interior was warm, and two other elves—Ascher and Nokky—appeared at Mardy’s side to bow deeply, whilst Draco helped Larissa with her coat behind Bellatrix.</p><p>“Mistress Bellatrix, this elf is knowing that she must go to Mistress Narcissa,” Mardy explained. “But all is in order. The other elflings is knowing that they is to be hospitable to all guests Mistress Bellatrix is entertaining.”</p><p>Bellatrix never imagined before how polite and tactful a House Elf could be about the fact that her girlfriend/lover was a muggleborn. That a House Elf had thought to warn the other elves about it. “Thank you, Mardy. I believe Cissy will be at Kensington Palace for the forseeable future, though I suppose if another Regent is appointed, she will move to Grimmauld Palace or even take up residence at 10 Downing Street.” It felt odd to say. “You may depart.”</p><p>“Mardy is not hearing the call from Mistress Narcissa yet. Mardy will stay. Dinner is of waiting!”</p><p>After the elves bowed for the guests, Bellatrix gestured onwards. She saw how Draco took the absolutely exhausted Larissa, all of them still in uniform, by the arm, to lead her to the dining hall.</p><p>“We’ll be expecting three more guests shortly,” Bellatrix observed. “Adjust the wards to allow for travel from Dublin: Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood, Ginevra Weasley.”</p><p>“They’re coming tonight?”</p><p>“Oh, of course, but I don’t when they’ll get it in…”</p><p>“Mardy is preparing of food in <em>service à la française</em>, in case not all guests arrive at once. Mardy is knowing this is a war, and guests can’t arrive on time.”</p><p>Bellatrix grinned. “Very sensible. Wars are like that, madness, chaos, guests not showing up for dinner on time; they have it all.” They arrived in the dining room, and Draco helped Larissa sit. The Russian aristocrat unbuttoned her cuffs and rolled back the sleeves on her uniform, which were still flecked with the mud and soot of campaign. But her intellect was still fully intact, as a cup of tea floated to her at the behest of the House Elves.</p><p>“Mardy is knowing Mistress Larissa is Russian, so the tea is having cherry preserves.”</p><p>“Thank you,” Larissa murmured, sincerely but absent-mindedly as she looked past Bellatrix. “Very impressive courtyard, M’lady,” she observed.</p><p>“Oh well, Ancient House is…” Draco began, but Bellatrix grinned, waved her hand, and grabbed her wand. She pointed it at the carpet and commanded it to roll back, revealing the precious ancient mosaics beneath, showing forests and spell-casting in the woods, the hunt and other wild things.</p><p>“Oh my God, Ancient House is a Roman Villa,” Larissa stared.</p><p>“Built inside of a Hillfort that my ancestresses held when they were priestesses, healers and wonder-workers for the Brigantine nation. As it happens, we were Britons through and through, but anyone can fall in love with baths, and hypocaust heating, and fine mosaics.”</p><p>There was a group of footsteps that abruptly halted. Bellatrix whipped around, she could never could <em> not </em>with the reflexes her life had given her, and saw Hermione standing, with Luna and Ginny at her side. One of the House Elves had unobtrusively slipped away, to lead them in for the dignity and respectability of the House.</p><p>Then she rose, pushed back her chair, got up, stepped quickly to Hermione’s side, seeing how cold and pale and stiff she was. The only sign of life in her was the way that she looked with curiosity at the mosaics. “Dear Lord, a Roman Villa,” Hermione muttered, repeating the declaration, before flashing a smile to Larissa. “Lara.”</p><p>Bellatrix was pressed against her after that, enfolding her into a hug, she kissed her cheek, and tried not to care when Hermione did not really respond.</p><p>“She’s had a long day,” Luna said gently, and walked to sit. “Tomorrow night is a <em>Ysbrydnos,</em> and it will be very special here. Spring is upon us! Summer will come.”</p><p>“It will be,” Bellatrix agreed, ushering Hermione to a seat and waving her wand to send the carpet back down. “I will walk the land’s quarters on <em>Calan Haf</em>, to re-strengthen the wards after so long of neglect. And we must find a May Pole.”</p><p>Tea, wine, coffee; cottage loaf, soft goat’s cheese, potted shrimps, black pudding. Simple and hearty, to return home to eat at the end of a campaign. Bellatrix poured her wine, and looked to Hermione. She wasn’t at all used to this reticence from her.</p><p>Ginny looked uncomfortable.</p><p>“Ahh, Miss Weasley,” Bellatrix began, looking for a weak spot to try and figure out what was going on. That was more than enough; it made Hermione snap immediately:</p><p>“Don’t bring Ginny into this, Bella. It’s about Azkaban. It’s about the fact that I shot down Avery.”</p><p>Bellatrix froze for a moment, wine-glass to her lips. A snort of laughter splashed some across her shrimps. “Avery was a revolting brute with tendencies toward being a paedophile which, I understand, got worse when he was released from Azkaban. Surely you shouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over that. What about…”</p><p>“Azkaban. Azkaban,” she repeated, looking down at her food. “Did you know that they were holding their own prisoners there, that we killed our own people?”</p><p>Bellatrix stared at her. “No, I rather did not.”</p><p>“We were responsible for planning the nuclear attack. Did nobody really know?”</p><p>“It was attacked as a matter of military necessity. The magical wards and defences on Azkaban would have taken out the missiles attack the Chunnel, as you well know; then we would have faced eight fresh divisions in the Midlands, and instead of thousands of massacred civilians, there might be hundreds of thousands.”</p><p>Hermione ignored her, and looked at Larissa.</p><p>“She’s right, my friend,” Larissa offered with a thin smile. “I love you like a sister, and I’d have still given the order if you had been there. It had to be done.”</p><p>“Yes, you’re quite right. It had to be done.” A sigh left Hermione’s body. She looked Bellatrix in the eyes. Bellatrix looked back—she wasn’t lying to Hermione about it. She couldn’t imagine lying to Hermione, not now. Not ever.</p><p>After a moment, Hermione smiled softly, exhausted but acknowledging her. “Bella,” she repeated softly, and then picked up her knife and fork, and tucked in.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes:</p><p>1. Service à la française - Dinner served with all the dishes on the table at once, and diners largely helping themselves. </p><p>2.  The Orangery - it was both a greenhouse and a place of entertainment at Kensington Palace, built at the behest of Queen Anne I. They were a feature of aristocratic palaces of the 18th century; there is a very fine preserved at Kuskovo in Moscow. </p><p>3. Surrender at discretion - A term of art in the laws of war meaning that no guarantees to the treatment of the surrendered are provided by the party they are surrendering to. Their treatment is "at the discretion" of the victors.</p><p>4. Roman villa construction -- penetrated into even Lancashire, and in this case would be very different from a typical aristocratic house of a wizarding family from later days, like the Malfoys. Larissa recognised instantly that the style was unusual. </p><p>5. Potted shrimps are quite common in Lancashire, because of the cockles and shrimp which can be harvested in Morecambe Bay.</p><p>6. As both Regent and Prime Minister, Narcissa has essentially dictatorial power, but has no intention of maintaining it longer than is required to settle the situation to her satisfaction, as outside of the total collapse of constitutional governance, it would be contrary to most recognised principles of Government in the British Isles. </p><p>7. The East Coast Mainline is the route that the Hogwarts Express takes from Kings Cross north to Scotland. It's probably the most familiar rail route to most wizarding families. </p><p>8. I invented the name Lucas for Theodore Nott's father. </p><p>9. A Ysbrydnos is a spirit night, where divination is powerful and the Gods are close to the Earth, in Brythonic custom. Nos Galan Haf/Calan Haf are essentially Beltane Eve and Beltane, to the Brythonic Celts instead of the Gaelic Celts.</p><p>10. BLEVE - Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0073"><h2>73. The Isle of Gramarye</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>So conflicted. She didn’t know where to start. She wanted to believe Bellatrix, and maybe she really did, with doubt refusing to go away. But what was the difference between doubt refusing to go away, and not believing someone? She wasn’t sure. Looking at Bella made her heart ache with desire. It was so easy to smile and move on. So hard to quiet what was inside of her heart.</p><p>The others filed out. Rooms were prepared; by this point, Hermione wasn’t surprised that Draco and Larissa left together, though she didn’t think it was anything more than a bedside conversation at that point. Larissa looked like she needed a week of sleep for anything else. Hermione felt like she needed a week of sleep, for that matter…</p><p>It was just the two of them. And, Mardy had already left to go to Kensington Palace to attend to Narcissa. The other two House Elves had, as Elves were wont to do, made themselves scarce. After perhaps a minute, Hermione owned up to the fact they were alone. “Bellatrix, what am I supposed to do?” She asked, softly, more a rhetorical question than anything else. But it made Bella draw herself up, and watch her intently. “Those were my friends and comrades.” A pause. “If they were my friends and comrades. Bella, you were in Voldemort’s regime until …” She trailed off. “Less than twenty months ago.”</p><p><br/>
Twenty months, was that it? Twenty months ago Bellatrix had been her mortal enemy, the woman who wanted to torture her to death… <em> The woman you’d had some kind of fucked up crush on even then? </em>Since then, Hermione’s mind had firmly built itself around Bellatrix being her love. She wanted it. She didn’t doubt Bellatrix loved her. But…</p><p>“You had to have known.”</p><p>“I was in Europe for years, only returning home to visit my daughter and report to <em>Him,</em>” Bellatrix answered, rocking back in her chair, staring at Hermione with richly expressive eyes. <em>Those eyes weren’t lying, were they? </em></p><p>Bellatrix got up, and began to pace. “Why do you think I was privy to information about the disposition of high-value prisoners? You believed me when I said I didn’t know about the abomination at Hogwarts, why this, Hermione? Why? We’re here.” She tossed her arm out, spun around. “Ancient House. My family home, we’ve liberated all the British Isles. I thought I was going to take you to my bed tonight, love.”</p><p>Hermione couldn’t help herself when Bella said that. What did she want? She wanted Bella, of course! She wanted her there and then, with a fiery passion that burned inside of her. Did she really give a shit about the angst, about the uncertainty? It had probably been Narcissa if it was anyway. Bellatrix was a very bad Slytherin in the worst of times.</p><p><em> You’ve already made your bed, are you a moral coward? You were in the goddamned Army </em> <em> that invaded to liberate your homeland</em><em>, you armed the bombs! Men better than Bella, better than you, helped by the thousand. They didn’t ask because they already understood that there was no other way. </em>Bellatrix kept pacing, muttering to herself, flitting glances at Hermione from the corner of her eye that were painfully obvious for Hermione to see.</p><p>What was she flinching away from, really? A residual moral effect of Dumbledore’s great insistence on never killing, which now looked ridiculous, disastrously counterproductive, even? But then, thinking about it, she saw him smiling, and ask her—<em> but would Bellatrix have been alive to defect, then? </em></p><p>No answer. None was possible. How could you account for possibilities? Did the thousands of pundits who would argue over whether or not your action was necessary to save the world, or a cynical ploy to cement your own power, really matter? They were in the future and they all had the luxury of opining because of what you chose now. They’d had to act, and they’d acted, and they were in Lancashire, a free Lancashire, and could argue the merits until doomsday. <em>You’ve chosen to love her, so fucking love her!</em></p><p>Hermione spun out of her chair, and caught Bella in mid-stride of her pacing. Pushed her into the wall. Now it was Bella’s turn for surprise, for an unpredictable lover, <em> who says two can’t play this game? </em>She pushed the smaller Witch into the wall. Pushed her arms back against tapestries and wood facades as old as history. Kissed her firmly, intensely. “Fuck you, Bella. Years ago I promised that I would die for victory. Nobody is going to tell me that living for victory is worse than that, simply because I fell in love with you. You chose your course, and so did I.”</p><p>Tongues met, and Hermione shoved a hand that pushed back in Bella’s skirt, groping at her right down to the centre between her thighs as their tongues tangled in a furious passion. Bellatrix stared at her with both shock and eagerness. Only reluctantly did Hermione pull back, trying to make herself look coy even as she didn’t necessarily feel it.</p><p>“Show me your bedroom, Bella.”</p><p>Bellatrix flashed a smile at her that was almost shy; she folded an arm around Hermione, and together, they went upstairs. Ancient House wasn’t as large of a villa as Fishbourne in Chichester—Hermione had been to the museum as a girl—but that it was of the second rank of Romano-British villas, couldn’t be doubted. Only a fraction was being used, though. Not only had the family declined in size, but the entire <em> Villa Rustica </em>section—the productive section of the estate—seemed closed off.</p><p>Hermione, even walking up to someone’s bedroom to have sex with her, wanting to be an intellectual about these things. It was also pasted across her face and expression, as plain as day. Bella started laughing brightly. “Oh, dear.”</p><p>“What, Bella, I’m just wondering about the economics of a Romano-British estate in Lancashire after the Statute…”</p><p>Bellatrix was giggling madly, then. “Yes, the estate fell on hard times with the Statute, as you might imagine. Some Goblins were retained to work rock and stone, and the elves keep our own gardens and fields for most of the food we need, but it hardly made money after that. You’re <em> so sweet. </em>You just ravished me and a minute later you sound like you’re some rambling professor. So, let me solve the problem.”</p><p>Hermione felt lips again on her own, as Bellatrix tugged her into her bedroom—with a wave of her hand, illuminating patterns in green and silver, and then the mosaics on the walls, revealed here, <em> came alive, </em> showing maidens dancing in the spring, the hunt in the forest, the playing of a game something like hurley. Hermione’s eyes lit with wonder, magical images <em> that old, </em>before she was pulled down onto a bed with black satin sheets.</p><p>She couldn’t help it, grinning up to Bella now as they folded together, cuddling atop the blankets. “More Black, really?”</p><p>“What can I say – I went through a phase in the sixties, and I never grew out of it.” she curled in closer to Hermione, eyes wide in the dim lights still glowing in Slytherin colours. It was like Hermione was consumed in Bellatrix, laughing softly at the frank admission, and then finding her lips together with Bella’s again.</p><p>But she didn’t get beyond the kiss soon enough for Bella’s taste: “Now hurry up, you dork; stop gawking and <em> fuck me.” </em></p><p>Blushing, grinning, laughing, Hermione reached for jacket and skirt-belt, tossed outer-layers of Bella’s and her own aside, went for the corset under the uniform jacket—the privileges of a General, who needed to be ‘regulation’--and kept going until she felt Bella’s hands removing her own bra. “Uhh…”</p><p>“I didn’t tell you to stop, ‘Mione…”</p><p><em>No, you didn’t, </em>Hermione thought as the two ended up, hands, arms tangled together and working at once, mostly managing to strip, with clothes tossed here and there, standing out in the dim magical light against the black velvet blankets, save the few that disappeared into the lush carpet.</p><p>There was something deliriously intoxicating about the idea of fucking a Pureblood in her own bedroom in her own family manor. Since the age of eleven, Hermione had been confronted with the idea that was inferior, it was casual, it was laced into Wizarding society. Even the Weasleys were intensely paternalistic toward muggles. Hermione’s parents and childhood friends were muggles. She had grown up constantly experiencing bigotry toward her.</p><p>And now she was playfully throwing Bella’s panties at her face as she spread her legs on her bed, in a house that was <em>literally </em>a Roman Villa. She couldn’t help it and didn’t want to help it, it was wildly hot. She looked up.</p><p>Bella looked back down at her, curls blending into the blanket below. “Hmm?”</p><p>“I love you, Bella,” Hermione grinned, and settling herself between Bella’s legs, planted a light kiss on the <em>other </em>set of thick black curls the woman had. Bella hummed soft and low in her throat, seeming remarkably content.</p><p><em>Maybe taking a lover here had always been a fantasy of her’s. </em>Hermione loved the thought; it was mutual transgression. “Teen girl’s bedroom dreams finally coming true?”</p><p>Bella’s head shot up. “Oh, why, you…”</p><p>Hermione shut her up with her tongue, or rather, made her moan with a soft stroke. “I think that meant yes, anyway,” was her own playful answer, and she buried her face into Bella’s lower curls and inhaled until the air running across Bella’s skin made her shiver softly. Then her tongue darted out, stroking across soft skin already wet, and up. She felt Bella’s hands enfold her head at once, urging her on.</p><p>Bellatrix never had been very patient about sex. Hermione’s natural impulse, too, was to please others. She <em>liked </em>doing it. Especially to someone she was in love with. And, she was a quick study and she knew it. Bella liked pressure around her clit, and Hermione pushed down with plump lips until she got moans from her, her tongue working from side to side at first to tease her, and then firmly licking, tasting the heady scent of sex on her lover, the sweat mingled into Bella’s black curls, haphazardly smushed into her mouth—a hair here or there, she didn’t care, and was more irritated at the way Bella’s hips, pushing up against her, thighs closing, drove her clit further away from Hermione’s tongue.</p><p>So she reached out with her hands and forced Bella’s hips down, pushed her thighs open, fought with the muscular legs of the short but not weak older woman. She was rewarded with a groan, Bella wanted it, she wanted <em>that, </em>she wanted a little contest, muscles straining just made the pleasurable tension at her sex better, more urgent.</p><p>“That’s right, never can get enough of me..” Hermione half-thought it, half-hummed it in a gulp of air, before renewing the pressure, straight down with her tongue, curling and rolling soft skin, slicking hair and letting her hands on Bella’s thighs do half the work, keeping her legs spread widely, her sex presented to Hermione; nowhere for her dark lover’s squirming hips to go, except into her mouth, into the pleasure she had so eagerly learned to give Bella.</p><p>The twisting, squirming, shaking of her thighs and hips under Hermione’s hands, the groan—Bellatrix was so vocal, she broke every stereotype Hermione had ever heard of—all of it came together, the delight of making her orgasm in her own childhood bed. She indolently licked with her tongue until the shivering and quick breaths from Bella suggested her lover was overstimulated, and then she looked up with something like a feeling of laughing delight. Thirty minutes before she had been locked in uncertainty and didn’t know what she wanted to do, or how she felt about the entire situation.</p><p>So, of course, they just went and fucked.</p><p>Bellatrix rolled onto her, splayed out across the bed, the covers messed up and tangled. Her thigh was shifting as she repositioned herself, shifting unhesitatingly between Hermione’s, pushing her knee between her legs. Hermione had no time to lose the wonderful high of pleasuring Bella and in fact her own pleasure was in her head a moment later, as Bellatrix thrust her thigh between Hermione’s legs, took advantage of how so utterly wet she was, so turned on, and began to <em>rub. </em>She coiled, tangled around Hermione like a snake. In this position, she could kiss her, and the older woman trailed a line of kisses around Hermione’s neck, too.</p><p>The younger witch just tossed her head back in abandon. Bella hadn’t asked, hadn’t waited. She’d just come for Hermione as quickly as they both had begun in the dining room. Hermione loved it. Bella had <em>never </em> neglected her pleasure. She was a haughty aristocratic bitch and probably still crazy; she was also a genuinely <em>good </em>lover, who paid attention to those she made love to.</p><p>Well, at least to Hermione, anyway.</p><p>Bella’s thigh was up between her own, and she shifted her own body, uncaring of how she had to brace her legs and arms around Hermione to support herself, until she could roll and rock her knee and thigh until she was slickly sliding her skin across Hermione’s sex, pushing down, tempering her motions responsively to each moan or quick inhalation that Hermione gave her for signal; the younger woman drowning in the sensation of the way Bella could use every part of her body to please her.</p><p>She wanted it, she was insistent in grinding her hips back up against Bella. The friction was quick but light, it would probably leave her chafed but she didn’t care, she didn’t care, she rubbed herself back against Bella, bodies pressed warmly down into the blankets. The sweat streaked across every inch of Bella’s body, holding herself <em>just </em>right and rubbing with one leg, … was an exercise that paid rewards as Hermione forgot about anything else, revelling in the dark angel above. She felt the need and the tension rising, shooting up in her body, not sure if she was close, and not sure if she was close, until at last she was.</p><p>The rush of pleasure and need banished all doubt. Her body twisting and spasming against Bella, hips bucking, thighs clenching, that was all she needed, everything she wanted. Falling in love with Bellatrix was perfect. Bellatrix, muscles tensed and body a mix of curves and firmness around her, held her with her thigh gripped in place between Hermione’s legs, until at last she relaxed, fell against the taller witch, breathing hard, both bodies drenched in each other’s sweat.</p><p>“Ancient House is going to be <em>our </em>Manor,” Bella whispered in the afterglow, dragging blankets over them haphazardly, but who really cared. “For <em>us. </em>For our family.”</p><p>Hermione closed her eyes, and held Bella close, the warmth of the covers banishing the cool chill of sweat on the skin. It was spring, and maybe there was hope, after all.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>They rose very late, sleeping in a comfortable bed that truly felt their own for the first time since leaving Norway. The House Elves set out breakfast—the bacon was smoked and streaky, lightly crispy; there were poached eggs, small loaves of crusty bread, black pudding, and Arbroath smokies, with tea that perfect colour, smokey and dark but not quite black; and of course, a special table for fitting on the bed to keep everything tidy.</p><p>Hermione sat there, leaning against Bellatrix, both of them leaning back against the bed boards, with pillows propped up to support their heads. If it wasn’t almost uncomfortably decadent, if Voldemort wasn’t still alive in the Near East, then it would seem like a dream at the end of the war. They said little—they ate breakfast, and cuddled.</p><p>A while later, after the elves apparated the breakfast table off the bed, Bellatrix coaxed two robes out of the wardrobe and over to the bed with her wand. “We should go down to the toilets and the baths,” she explained, almost absently.</p><p><em>Full Roman experience, </em>Hermione realised. There was a bit of real excitement even if it was also slightly weird—indeed, Ancient House had central plumbing and central heating, but of a decidedly 200 AD type.</p><p>There fortunately had been <em>some </em>upgrades to the toilets, at least, but the baths took Hermione’s breath away. The mosaics were perfectly preserved, and were not at all like the typical Roman ones that she had seen on television shows when young. They were instead a detailed religious story of Arnemetia, Brigantia, and Coventina and her nymphs, water-goddesses of Britannia, celebrating the baths and cleanliness and the youth and spring they represented. The whole hall was lit by magical lights, and though nowhere near as large as a stereotypical Roman public bath, the ancient family of Dubh had clearly loved water because the full Roman bathing progression was available.</p><p>“It’s easier when the hypocaust is fired with magic instead of wood,” Bellatrix declared, and spun off her robe.</p><p>“What of the others?”</p><p>“Elves help guests too, at least when they’re told to,” Bellatrix declared. “Bathing first for us, they might already have for all I know. Then we’ll all gather, for we must go out for hawthorn.”</p><p><em>Nos Galan Haf. </em>The time to gather Hawthorn for the houses, before May Day. Hermione smiled, and slipped off her own robe to join Bellatrix in the progression of bathing. Days of chaos, a night of passion, it all slipped off into baths which were happily working their way toward their two thousandth anniversary.</p><p>And Bellatrix wasn’t hiding her arm, and Hermione wasn’t hiding her scar. The gold glimmered wetly, and shimmered under the blazing hot water of the central solium pool in the Caldarium. The scar was blurred by the tiny waves that rippled over it. Hermione leaned against Bellatrix, and felt quiet and content, as they moved next together to the intense dry heat of the laconicum.</p><p>She could see that Bellatrix was quietly looking at her scar. “Bella? I’m proud of you, for what it’s worth. You have nothing to be ashamed of with your arm. It’s a symbol of your escape from Voldemort. You don’t try to deny what you’ve done in the past that was evil—you should take credit for what you have done that is good, too. Show the world that arm with pride. Show them that you suffered to end Voldemort’s power over you, and suffered to be able to act successfully against him.”</p><p>Bellatrix sighed softly. “Perhaps I should. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if you’re here. If you’ll still be here… Still be here tomorrow.”</p><p>“Bella!? Why are you talking like that?” Hermione asked sharply through the steam.</p><p>“Your scar. I’ll be plain with you. When you were falling, at the viaduct at Hogwarts, I used the connection to the scar to recover you. Right after I had promised to give you the time you need, to support you, that I had never influenced you with it, right then, when it was fresh in my mind—for the Gods so jest with us mortals.”</p><p>Hermione froze. <em>For the Gods so jest with mortals. </em>It was true, it was an evil coincidence. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”</p><p>“I was ashamed,” Bella answered, and the force of those words struck Hermione like a blow. It was an admission she had never heard from Bella and that simple word, <em>ashamed, </em>meant so much from the proud, haughty pureblood. “And,” she continued softly, “I was afraid that even if you didn’t leave me over it, you’d insist on having your own arm struck off right there and then to remove the possibility of my ever influencing you with it, ever again.”</p><p>Hermione took a breath and leaned into Bella. Bella was the problem, but Bella was also holding her and comforting her. It was one of those complicated moments in the world where the person you loved was also the complication, the difficulty. It hurt like hell, but that made her hold Bella all the closer for it.</p><p>“It saved my life. The scar you gave me, with about as hateful and racist of a slur as I’ve ever been called—not the only one but certainly the one that hurt worse—it saved my life. Everything about that is fucked up, Bella. But we’re in a war, and … Having this on my arm forever is not what I want. Muggle science invented artificial arms with synthetic skin. I’m sure with some effort we can coat an enchanted prosthetic in synthetic skin. For both of us. But not now. Not yet. I’ll give you until … One year after Voldemort is dead, Bella. Then it’s got to go. One year. And I want you to do it yourself.”</p><p>Bellatrix froze.</p><p>“You did it to me,” Hermione said softly, holding the shorter woman all the harder for it. “You un-do it. If you can’t fix it, you take my arm. You enchant the prosthetic. Don’t force someone else to do the work, even someone else who loves and cares for me like a sister like Larissa. Do it yourself. Take ownership of it. Heal me, or end it. But either way, do it yourself.”</p><p>Bella looked at the wall, squeezed her hand, and nodded. “I swear.”</p><p>“Good.” Hermione smiled. “We’ve been sweating long enough.” She tugged Bella up, and took them together to plunge into the frigidarium, a small pool here, but deep enough to be fully immersed for several people, and then, they retired to the comfortably warm tepidarium to warm back up, and at last, began to dress. Hermione was necessarily stuck with her uniform, her belongings had not got here yet, but she was surprised to see Bellatrix drape herself in a comfortable dress—still with a bodice, granted—of browns and greens of the wood, leggings and a pair of deerskin soft-soled boots. And, she didn’t hesitate to live her promise. She went out with Hermione to the portico of the peristylium. The others had already gathered there, and hot tea was available. Ginny and Draco both seemed shocked at the way that Bellatrix was dressed, though Luna just smiled.</p><p>“Lady Black!” She was holding a guitar in her lap. “A blessed <em>Nos Galan Haf </em>for you! We are going for hawthorn, this afternoon?”</p><p>“We will,” Bellatrix agreed, and couldn’t help but a small smile at the brilliant innocence of the Lovegood girl. She seemed to have completely forgotten, or simply chosen not to remember, her own captivity in Malfoy Manor.</p><p>Instead, as Bellatrix and Hermione joined them and took tea, she started to strum a few chords, warming herself up for a song. Hermione looked to Larissa, feeling a bit of consternation, but her friend greeted her with a smile, reclining on one of the couches close to Draco.</p><p>“A very long night’s sleep and that absolutely amazing bath certainly have me feeling revived,” she offered.</p><p>“...The same,” Hermione agreed, though she imagined her sleep hadn’t been as long as Larissa’s.</p><p>“You are the guest of the House of Black for as long as you please to recuperate with our hospitality, Lady Larissa,” Bellatrix addressed her.</p><p>“Thank you, M’lady.”</p><p>Luna was smiling again. “That may be for a while,” she mused. “And that makes me think of a song.” The chord shifted, and she began first to hum, and then to sing, as Bellatrix looked with interest at her remark, and Larissa quickly glanced to Draco, and then focused with her own interest on the song.</p><p>Hermione quickly realised that it was a Kipling poem, put to music.</p><p>“<em>SEE you the ferny ride that steals<br/>
Into the oak-woods far?<br/>
Oh that was whence they hewed the keels<br/>
That rolled to Trafalgar.”</em></p><p>Larissa stared, entranced, her hot tea cupped to her hands, leaning against Draco openly, now.</p><p>“<em>And mark you where the ivy clings<br/>
To Bayharn's mouldering walls?<br/>
Oh there we cast the stout railings<br/>
That stand around St. Paul's.”</em></p><p>Hermione shivered, too. For her family, the idea of Britishness was complicated by her own family. She certainly knew that Kipling was a man of a beautiful imagination and a care for the common man and a lyrical ability to frame the wisdom of India into the British soul, and to give voice to the British soul. Hermione felt intensely British in this moment, in this place, as Bella’s lover in Ancient House, where at the back of the peristylium she could see the room that held the idols of the old family Gods of the House Black.</p><p>Kipling had also been a bloodthirsty, racist defender of Empire. Hermione was ambivalent, sure, but she was sitting happily next to Bellatrix Black. It gave her an absolute perspective on the good and bad within everyone.</p><p>“<em>See you the dimpled track that runs<br/>
All hollow through the wheat?<br/>
Oh that was where they hauled the guns<br/>
That smote King Philip's fleet.”</em></p><p>But despite all that, despite her own experience, in that moment, Hermione felt downright <em>patriotic. </em>They had won. They had liberated the country.</p><p>“<em>(Out of the Weald, the secret Weald,<br/>
Men sent in ancient years,<br/>
The horse-shoes red at Flodden Field,<br/>
The arrows at Poitiers!)</em></p><p>
  <em>See you our little mill that clacks,<br/>
So busy by the brook?<br/>
She has ground her corn and paid her tax<br/>
Ever since Domesday Book.”</em>
</p><p>Luna caught the line about Flodden Field with delicate sincerity. In fact, Kipling meant the poem from an English perspective, though Hermione knew there was a subtle complexity in that toward the end. Luna clearly did, too, because she inflected the verse with all the terrible sadness and tragedy of Civil War, instead of the slightest hint of triumphalism. It was beautiful.</p><p>“<em>See you our stilly woods of oak,<br/>
And the dread ditch beside?<br/>
Oh that was where the Saxons broke<br/>
On the day that Harold died.”</em></p><p>Bellatrix was stiff, now. Hermione could see it, see the family history. The Saxons had conquered, aye, but it was the Harrowing of the North by William the Conqueror which had sent her family into exile for centuries. It was the Normans that had ended the first era of Ancient House. Hermione could imagine, centuries later, an earlier-Bellatrix, a 15<sup>th</sup> century Bellatrix, weeping to at last return to this place, the home of her ancestors, preserved by magic in the meanwhile, until in the reign of Henry V they had earned their return to it. But England had become more Norman and more Saxon all at once. The Old North of the British folk, of Bella’s blood, had gone underground, to the murmur of a secret river in the culture and customs of the people of the North.</p><p>And at this spring, it was blossoming again. Hermione thought Bella might nearly be crying.</p><p>“<em>See you the windy levels spread<br/>
About the gates of Rye?<br/>
Oh that was where the Northmen fled,<br/>
When Alfred's ships came by.<br/>
<br/>
See you our pastures wide and lone,<br/>
Where the red oxen browse?<br/>
Oh there was a City thronged and known,<br/>
Ere London boasted a house. </em></p><p>
  <em>And see you, after rain, the trace<br/>
Of mound and ditch and wall?<br/>
Oh that was a Legion's camping-place,<br/>
When Caesar sailed from Gaul.” </em>
</p><p>Hermione was seized by the sudden need to embrace Bellatrix, and whisper to her: “You adopted what the Romans brought, and built this wonderful house at your place of power. Things changed, but the House of Black remained strong. Will you adopt muggleborns into your culture, and remain strong? You have changed and been strong before, my love.”</p><p>Bellatrix softly began to weep.</p><p>“<em>And see you marks that show and fade,<br/>
Like shadows on the Downs?<br/>
Oh they are the lines the Flint Men made,<br/>
To guard their wondrous towns.<br/>
<br/>
Trackway and Camp and City lost,<br/>
Salt Marsh where now is corn-<br/>
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,<br/>
And so was Britain born.”</em></p><p>Hermione caught it. The only change of a word so far in Luna’s rendition. The substitution of Britain for England. And she understood why, too, for what came next:<br/>
<br/>
<em>“She is not any common Earth,<br/>
Water or wood or air,<br/>
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,<br/>
Where you and I will fare.” </em></p><p><em>Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye, where you and I will fare. </em>Hermione shivered and held Bellatrix close as Luna finished. It was the whole island that was Merlin’s Gramarye, from the land athwart the Orkneys to the view of the Isles of Scilly from Land’s End.</p><p>“Welcome to Britain,” Luna said sweetly to Larissa.</p><p>Larissa smiled fiercely and squeezed Draco’s hand. “So, you said something about a custom of Hawthorn gathering?”</p><p>As they headed out into the woods, on this sacred eve, Hermione couldn’t help but think of another Kipling poem suited to the evening, and wonder about Larissa and Draco.</p><p>
  <em>Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,<br/>
Or he would call it a sin;<br/>
But we have been out in the woods all night,<br/>
A-conjuring Summer in! </em>
</p><p>“Do you think they’re going to…?” Hermione whispered as they were out into the woods on the estate.</p><p>“...Not going to put bets on my nephew’s sex life, pet,” Bellatrix answered immediately, deftly seizing another bough. She had clearly done this as a child.</p><p>Hermione blushed. It was awkward, to have one of your best friends apparently falling for the <em>nephew </em>of the woman you wanted to spend your life. But that was what you got, when you dated someone almost thirty years older than you were.</p><p>“Anyway,” Bellatrix grinned and whispered into her ear, her lips close enough to make Hermione shiver, “No way am I such a fucking mark that I’d take a bet with odds that poor.”</p><p>Bellatrix was right. Larissa and Draco stayed out in the woods all night, conjuring summer in.</p><p>And the next day, with May Poles up in the villages of mixed wizard and muggle-folk around, and the din and clamour of the bells and drums; the Morris Dancing and the May Queens—the general and joyous celebration of a people liberated—Draco, tired but grinning, carried the House standard for Bellatrix, and Bellatrix beat the stick down along the boundary stones, marking out the limits of the estate. The smile and light expression on Larissa’s face was a relief, for the friend that Hermione had seen destroying herself for the past year.</p><p>There was still a war somewhere, but today was <em>Calan Haf. </em>There was mead and beer and dancing and song, and summer came for Merlin's Isle of Gramarye.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The two Kipling poems quoted are “Puck’s Song” and “A Tree Song”. I composed the scene while listening to the version of Puck’s Song put to music by Leslie Fish, but Peter Bellamy’s rendition is certainly the definitive one.</p><p> </p><p>Further Note:<br/>I owe an apology to my readers, especially those outside of Britain. "Gramarye" is the ancient spelling of Grimoire--secret, magical knowledge. "Britain, Merlin's Isle of Magic" is what is implied by the poem and the use of the term.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0074"><h2>74. The Tower</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Tower</b>
</p><p> </p><p>From a young age, Narcissa Black had begun to learn that the levers of power were much, much more complicated than a simple <em>Avada Kedavra </em>flung into the face of an enemy. That there was a subtle magic in the way that one reached power, and reached out inside of a society to create alliances and network with interested parties to accomplish your interests and intents. She had become the consummate Slytherin, right up to and including accepting her arranged marriage, and making the very best of being Narcissa Malfoy.</p><p>Frankly, her eldest sister had probably just argued her way into the House because it was traditional for all the Blacks to be there. Bellatrix was more of a Gryffindor than anyone would care to admit. <em>Or, Dumbledore altered the sorting hat to make sure that all Dark Witches and Dark Wizards could be in Slytherin and not with his precious Lions. Have to maintain their reputation, after all. </em></p><p>Sometimes, Dumbledore had been a very good Slytherin, for all of his hatred of the house which had been barely disguised while he was the Headmaster. Narcissa knew that many Slytherins presently considered her a traitor, but in fact, she didn’t care a fig about it. She was going to save their entire culture, and she was going to do it <em>exactly </em>by being patient and cunning.</p><p>That meant, among other things, that symbols mattered. One of them, for Narcissa, was 10 Downing Street. They were still making repairs after a series of indifferent Death Eater occupations, but she was already living in it. Narcissa was quite well aware that the people of the British Isles would want a symbol of a return to functional, normative governance. The symbols and traditions of the past were more important than the exact nature of government now. She could, and would, pursue her reforms quickly and efficiently, taking advantage of her firm control over the Rump Parliament, but to the broader world she must absolutely project the image of a Prime Minister, as people expected one to be—living at 10 Downing Street, giving press conferences, flashing a V sign for Victory when the Press caught up to her with a camera. And this, Narcissa Malfoy knew well, was a fair price to pay for the power to get things done.</p><p>She’d moved quickly on the most controversial legislation. The Parliament Act of 2004 held that the passage of the Parliament Act of 1911 had never been approved by the <em>Lords Magical </em>(that is, the Wizengamot) and was therefore unconstitutional. Against a constitutional challenge to this theory—which relied upon reserved powers to the Wizengamot which had not been used in centuries because of the Statute of Secrecy—the Act provided for a proscriptive repeal of the Parliament Act of 1911. The Parliament Act of 1949 was declared secondary legislation and, unconstitutional (such a theory had been mooted before, but never tested before the Law Lords). The Act provided for the regular seating of the Lords Magical, and addressed the issue of a dispute between the Chambers, by allowing for the Commons to force a joint seating if a second attempt to pass legislation, after a delay of one year, failed; in the joint seating of the Lords and Commons a simple majority would count equivalent to passage by majorities in both chambers separately, and this measure, inspired by the Australian Constitution, would mitigate the risk of deadlock while creating an enduring power for the Lords, and the Wizengamot.</p><p>Buried in the series of lesser legislation of less extreme constitutional import was the Marriage Act of 2004. Narcissa was well aware that her government would be highly dependent on Conservative support. She had also promised her sister that she could marry Hermione, and Narcissa was not the kind of woman who reneged on promises to family. Fortunately, in ancient times, the Priests of the British Gods had conducted certain ceremonies between those of the same sex, and some of the present practising Priests and Priestesses, accurately or not, considered them equivalent to Marriage. So the Act innocuously provided for any religion’s internal rules on the sanctification of marriage, to be considered valid before the law of the Realms for the purposes of the Government considering two persons married. This maintained the ban on polygamy, but implicitly gave her the power to decide, by policy (and this was a given at the moment, considering the wizarding population’s high proportion of traditional polytheists) to recognise her own religion’s rules in such a way as to provide for lawful homosexual marriage. In the stroke of a pen, Narcissa legalised gay marriage without calling it gay marriage, and in a way that would let her defend it before Parliament as an Act supporting religious freedom. It would doubtless create some administrative problems later with matters like Islamic divorce, but once the principle was established, it would face less opposition to be subsequently reformed and expanded. Entrenchment was the first step in any social reform, though Narcissa would not countenance calling it a reform, as she was not a Christian to begin with, and thought nothing of the idea of her sister being wedded to another woman, even if the wizarding world had long ago adopted such morality, its time, like the time of blood purity laws, was well and truly done.</p><p>That all brought her to the final matter for consideration, which was she was reviewing with her Cabinet, in the Cabinet Room. Her back to the fireplace, which was roaring—she had insisted on proper fires and other traditional means of heat, and it was a chilly morning for May. The world still felt the impact of a touch of Nuclear Winter. Morning frost would last straight through the whole month, like as not, that year. Hot tea in hand, and a list in front of her, settled in comfortably to the only chair with armrests. An Act, but also a list.</p><p>An Act of Attainder which had 11,568 names on it. William Hague was sitting at the position of the Leader of the House of Commons. He had somehow managed to avoid collaborating (Narcissa wasn’t really sure how, but it barely mattered) and provided perfectly willing to support to agenda for the government. In this case the role was critical because Narcissa needed someone to control the Commons for her, sitting in the Lords. Narcissa was confident he could be controlled to execute her agenda.</p><p>The Home Secretary was a young, hard-charging Indian woman who had survived the purges of the politically active because she had resigned from the Conservative Party to enter the private sector. Priti Patel had been selected in part from among those older and more conservative precisely because, unencumbered with pre-war attitudes about Capital Punishment, she had been perfectly willing to support the implementation of an Act of Attainder.</p><p>“The logistics will be difficult, Your Grace,” the Home Secretary was explaining. “We will use Smithfield for the bulk of the executions, by axe and hanging. Church-men on the list will be executed at St. Paul’s. Military personnel and Lords who are condemned, will be shot or beheaded on Tower Hill. Execution sites for those condemned in Cornwall, Wales, the Duchy of Lancaster, Scotland, Mann and the Channel Islands will need to be established separately. Completing all the executions before the Summer Solstice like you have requested will be difficult.”</p><p>“Witches and Wizards on the list will be executed at Tower Hill with the nobility and military personnel,” Narcissa noted, making a brief note. “We will have no echo of the witch trials; it will be beheading.”</p><p>“Of course, Your Grace.” The Home Secretary’s background meant she had no particular association with the complexities of identity as a Witch in the British Isles. To her it made the job somewhat easier; Smithfield would be too bloody busy, otherwise. “We will have to execute more than two hundred people a day at Smithfield, Your Grace. Seventy-five gallows, prepared and used thrice daily except Sundays.”</p><p>“Your Grace would be advised that even with the mood of the people angry for the outrages against them, that it will not look good to conduct such mass executions,” Hague observed.</p><p>“I understand, Mister Hague, however, we have recommended more than fifty thousand others to Royal Clemency who otherwise would also be executed. We have already reduced the number from the sixty-five thousand who deserve it, down to those who are truly the most loathsome.”</p><p>“It will look worse if we don’t show the people that those who oppressed them are being punished. And, it will acknowledge the plain fact that both of our worlds have changed forever.” Rittogott observed. He had been made the Minister for Goblin Affairs; there were two Goblins at the table today, the second was Therais Gringott, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. For the moment Narcissa was holding the portfolio of Minister of Magic, along with being the Prime Minister, along with being the Regent. She did not get very much sleep. And she let the Goblin and Hague have their exchange for a bit before interjecting. “The reality is, criminals of this kind can’t be allowed to have a future place in civil society. I acknowledge that the sheer logistics of the executions are problematic, but we will make the situation look better by assembling a number of those who have been given clemency, to receive their clemency, at the same time as the executions, to make it clear to all involved that there were many more criminals, and only the very worst are being put to the gallows. We will make a clear differentiation--the same way the new Scottish government will handle the execution of the collaborators, having those nationalists who did not commit crimes organise the executions of those who did.”</p><p>Narcissa leaned back, settling her empty glass down, to where it was quickly refilled. She always took at least two cups of tea with the morning cabinet meeting. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are still fighting a war against the Dark Lord’s power. We cannot afford to spare those who would betray us, when combat yet rages around half the globe. The people will support us. Now is the time for decisive measures. Let the executions begin tomorrow, starting with the senior Death Eaters and department heads of Voldemort’s magical government.”</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The Elder Nott, at least, died with some dignity. He was taken from the Tower, where he had been held since the surrender of his forces at Discretion (the surrender would not save him, but it had saved most of his troops). He mounted the scaffold on Tower Hill, and stood before the chopping block, which had been established in front of 10 Trinity Square. An immense man of a British half-Giant had been selected as the Executioner, so that the blows would be clean and he could accomplish many of them in a single day. Nott handed him a bag of galleons, and then addressed Narcissa, who stood on the steps of 10 Trinity Square.</p><p>“I believe you have prostituted yourself out to the muggles, Your Grace, and have agreed to terms that will mean the end of our people. I die as I live, having believed firmly from the first in pureblood superiority justifying pureblood supremacy. I swore an oath to My Lord, and admit the power of no muggle government, even one whose Minister is a Pureblood Witch, to judge me. You have made yourself, Your Grace, into a Blood Traitor, and I believe your work in conquering this nation from My Lord will ultimately be undone. However, I ask you to consider, and for you and all the people of this realm to know, that it was I alone, as the Pater Familias, who made the decisions for my family, and that if you come into power over my son, that his actions were in conformity and obedience to me, and the Government of My Lord which I taught him was lawful since his birth, and therefore which ever charges you lay against me, cannot be held against him, for he only obeyed those who had power and influence over him from the first moment of his life. I therefore now go to my death with my only regret being that I could not better serve My Lord!”</p><p>Held in enchanted Goblin-forged manacles which prevented him from trying to cast any wandless magic, he was now made to kneel and place his head on the block. In the grey sky of a May spring day, the axe raised, glimmering and glinting in even the faint sun. Then it felt, and blood flicked through the air, and in a single clean stroke, Nott’s head rolled from his body, into the basket prepared for it. A roar erupted from the crowd. Truly, Voldemort had broken the modern world. A decade ago, most of the people cheering at the execution would have been horrified at the prospect of a public execution in the United Kingdom, or even an execution at all. Now they cheered one. The executioner reached down with one massive arm and held it up, dripping. “Behold the head of a traitor!”</p><p>It was precisely for that reason, among others, that the executions had to take place, and Narcissa watched them with cold composure whilst standing on the steps.</p><p>The next one brought forward was Umbridge, also brought from her cell in the Tower. She was screaming and sobbing, struggling against the guards who dragged her toward the scaffold. The crowd responded appropriately; they mocked and jeered her and threw garbage at her. The list of her crimes, from desecrating the dead to torturing children for entertainment while the Headmistress at Hogwarts, was extensive, but of course the plain fact as it was announced was that she had been Attaindered by Parliament, and that was sufficient to put her on the block.</p><p>Even the Home Secretary looked disgusted with her lack of composure, particularly when Umbridge soiled herself as her head was laid on the block.</p><p>“She should be quartered for what she did to the bodies of the defenders of Hogwarts, and my late husband,” Narcissa remarked softly to the Home Secretary, with a savage chill in her whispered voice. “However, I will not take a personal vengeance for those I know, when I am not quartering those who brutally massacred the people in Birmingham or Manchester, or gassed York Minster.”</p><p>“Truth be told, Your Grace,” Patel answered, “Perhaps we should have included a few quarterings. However, if we were being traditional in that case, the law would provide for her to be burned.” The comment made Narcissa think that, while she had her faults, Patel was certainly the best choice for a Home Secretary in the circumstances!</p><p>“I AM PURE!” Umbridge was screaming now, looking toward them. “HAVE YOU NO DIGNITY TO EXECUTE WITCHES AT THE BEHEST OF MUGGLES, MALFOY!? OUR BLOOD SHOULD MATTER TO YOU MORE THAN THE WHOLE OF A MUGGLE NATION!”</p><p>With her blonde hair held tightly braided and her blue-grey eyes focused in a frigid gaze, Narcissa said nothing.</p><p>“HOW CAN YOU LET A SUBHUMAN TAKE THE LIFE OF A WITCH?”</p><p><em> You really shouldn’t say that about your executioner, </em> Narcissa mused. While she did not have Umbridge quartered, she couldn’t say she was upset when somehow, despite his strength, it took the Executioner four blows to part Dolores Umbridge’s head. <em> Perhaps you should have been more polite. </em></p><p>High-ranking muggle government collaborators would be next on the block.</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione arrived in London feeling perfectly numb to the executions happening in the city. They were an inevitability of the Liberation. Passing Smithfield on her way to 10 Downing Street, she could see the bodies swinging from the dawn executions. They would soon be taken down and the gallows prepared for the Noontide executions. Voldemort had tried to overturn all of society, but society had, in the passage of time, survived. <em> And, Hey Then, Up Go We. </em></p><p>When she arrived at 10 Downing Street, a guard got the door for her—she was saluted, she was a Colonel, after all, and in dress uniform, even though she was meeting the woman who would be her sister-in-law, a certain formality was very much demanded.</p><p>“Your Grace.”</p><p>“Come sit,” Narcissa gestured to one of the chairs in her study. “Is all well at Ancient House?”</p><p>“Very fine, thank you. Bella has busied herself with making arrangements to put the rest of the land back under cultivation,” Hermione answered, feeling odd about the idea that small talk now included the details of how an estate was being farmed.</p><p>“I have appointed a reliable Goblin to head the commission running the affairs of the Duchy of Lancaster and I confess I haven’t had the time to think about it beyond that, for even a moment,” Narcissa admitted with a wry smile. “I have already covered today affairs related to the naval construction programme, the National Conscription Act—we are calling for a million soldiers—the rights of Coal Miners to organise unions—I have heard a real earful from my conservative coalition partners about that—and of course repair work to the railways, which with fuel for automobiles and lorries rationed are hideously overstrained.”</p><p>“And executions?”</p><p>“Patel is perfectly capable of handling that,” Narcissa shrugged lightly. “Tea?”</p><p>“Of course.” Hermione took the offered cup. “You wanted to speak to me about Ireland?”</p><p>“Yes,” Narcissa agreed. “You had quite the victory there, but it was also unexpected. The successful coup d’etat against Voldemort’s High Commissioner was something of a surfeit of victory. We have managed to get two divisions of troops into Ulster, but the situation there remains quite tense. Since you worked with them on the coup, I want to ask your honest opinion—do you think the Irish government might take up arms against us?”</p><p><em> Y es, that would be important enough for this conversation, and in person, too. </em>Hermione’s expression tightened. “It’s a deeply complicated matter. You’re Celtic, the Wizarding community of Ireland sees itself as part of a broader Celtic nation. There is much support for your government in Dublin. I think that the Irish political parties broadly wish to support your government, but they’d all be happier if it seemed more like a smaller version of the European Union than an enlarged United Kingdom, to put it bluntly. The Republican sentiment against the Crown remains strong in Ireland, and … Well, as the Taoiseach himself put it, if you were the President of a Celtic Confederation, you would probably have the support of ninety percent of the Irish population at this point. The problem is the image of the Crown.”</p><p>“Well, that’s what he says, at any rate. In fact, in my conversations with the Government in Dublin, they openly encouraged me to declare myself President,” Narcissa noted.</p><p>Once upon a time, Hermione might have supported that, though her own family had always generally been pro-Monarchy. Now, she understood that was simply not something Narcissa would countenance. She would not put the spirit of political parties, faction and ideology back into a country where it had largely been exorcised. Narcissa Malfoy’s objective was depoliticisation, in the context of the British constitutional order, but depoliticisation nonetheless, and Voldemort’s hammer sweeping through the British elite before her had made it possible.</p><p>Hermione had become part of the family, now, and Britain had become the family business.</p><p>“Narcissa,” she said, softly, “It will be a thorn in your side, unless there’s some way to keep distance in our institutions.”</p><p>“There may be one, Hermione,” Narcissa answered, looking at the young woman thoughtfully. “I know you are politically ambitious, to put it frankly, and I think that’s good, for you, and for Bella. You understand just how important putting this all behind us will be, for your own personal goals in life, and for your fiancee.”</p><p>“We haven’t formally proposed yet!” Hermione spluttered.</p><p>A soft laugh. “Maybe one of you should fix that. But, let’s stay with the matter at hand. I have spoken with the King, and an interesting solution may arise which provides a compromise to everyone. You see, the King has heavily invested himself in the defence of his realms in the South Pacific. Australia, New Zealand, and most of the islands of Polynesia and Melanesia, whether or not they were originally part of the Commonwealth, or another country, like New Caledonia—are now united in a Federation. Because of the destruction of the government in Canberra at the start of the War, the King has essentially been running the government on a day to day basis there, and is seen as a successful commander and wartime leader by the people; support for the monarchy and the new federal government reaches ninety percent. New Guinea and the Christian Molucca Islands, including Timor, have similar rates of support and Federal troops have launched a series of invasions, now that Voldemort’s allies have been thrown back in that theatre. I have encouraged the King to devote himself to the continued building of this Royal Federation in Oceania.”</p><p>Hermione rocked back. “You mean to reverse the normal order. The King in Melbourne, a Governor-General in Britain.”</p><p>“Yes. I think the appointment of a Gaelic Governor-General of Britain would overcome most of the concerns that the Irish government has, keeping the Crown at a remove, and would quiet most of the risk of armed resistance in Ireland. They know that they <em>cannot </em>win, not if the Gaelic wizarding community refuses to support them. And, most of the political class that supported the Republic is on thin ice in some way or another, and knows it, of those who are not dead or under arrest. Finally, the King can send one of his sons back to Britain to be raised, outside of London, to be fluent in at least the principle Gaelic and Brythonic languages—Irish Gaelic and Welsh. Ultimately, one of his sons can inherit the crown of Oceania, and one the crown of Britain.”</p><p>“I think it’s the kind of compromise that, liked by no one, might just be the basis of an enduring political settlement,” Hermione offered, admitting, once again, that she was genuinely impressed by how clever Narcissa was. That it would tend to reinforce her own rule wasn’t something lost on Hermione, but if she was going to have a family with Bella, the younger witch acknowledged that was—simply an imperative.</p><p>“Thank you. Then we seem to be in concurrence, Hermione.”</p><p>“We are… Was that really all you called me here for, Narcissa? It seems like you already had your mind made up about it.”</p><p>“I still wanted a read on the situation from the woman who had seen that government with her own eyes,” Narcissa answered. “However, you are right. I didn’t call you here just to discuss that, as I had already decided it was the best course of action, and you merely confirmed this. Rather, I’m here to address the second element of an enduring settlement. The reality is that even this proposed compromise will be insufficient. As we have discussed before, my intention is a union of the whole of the <em>British peoples, </em>which means both the Celtic nations, and the Anglo-Saxon nation in England, which is admixed to our soil, comprised primarily of our blood regardless of language, and as much a part of this place as we are—as much as some Celts would rather not admit this. But to balance the population of Britain between the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon elements, we must consider the mainland populations as well. This government has already been in negotiation with the independent regimes of Galicia and Brittany. Of course, Brittany has a healthy Brythonic language community; Galicia does not among muggles, but does amongst Wizards. I also have a personal connection to Brittany. As you may remember, Draco and I helped defend Brest, during the Night of Fire.”</p><p>Hermione listened, her attention rapt. She knew that, at some point in the future, this might cause deep bitterness in the nations of western Europe. But the plain fact was that Britain had not been nuked, and France and Spain had. They might well never regain their old power, while Britain, free of Voldemort’s rule, might enjoy an unearned prosperity from the simple fact of being the country under his power at the hour the war began. The <em> Night of Fire. </em>For a moment, Hermione was haunted by the memory of the fireballs rising to the sky in eastern France, which would never quite leave her until the day she died.</p><p>“You mean to publicly have them switch sides as part of the constitutional settlement? They will be immediately invaded, the Death Eater forces on the Continent are strong.”</p><p>“That is what we are raising a fresh Army for, Hermione. To defend Brittany and Galicia, and turn them into ulcers on Voldemort’s western flank, while we figure out how to arrange his decisive defeat. The arrival of fresh Indian troops in Iraq slowed his Army’s pace toward Ararat to a crawl, but now that we are back in power here, we must turn our attention, without hesitation, to finding some way to work his utter destruction. President Nazarbayev expects me to invade the Continent to support Russian Arms in the field, without hesitation. He has every right to, and I do not intend to short him. And, the Governments of Brittany and Galicia understand that this is the only way to save their national autonomy and their own necks. So they’ll run the risk of their lands being turned into war-zones. As a gesture of confidence in the alliance, in our forces, and in the union of the British peoples, I intend to go to Brest to personally receive the key to the city, the homage of the wizards, and sign documents establishing the allegiance of Brittany to the Crown. I would have you make the security arrangements and command the guard force.”</p><p>The younger witch couldn’t help it, she gleamed with pride, even if it meant abandoning the idyll at Ancient House, and returning once more to the saddle. “Another chance to strike a blow against Voldemort’s regime? With pleasure.”</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>When they arrived in Brest, with the Royal Navy off the coast, providing cover for the operation with two fleet carriers and two light carriers, the first thing that Hermione saw was the massed bagpipe band. Their pipes skirling before the Château de Brest, the throats of a thousand singers took up the song of <em> An Alarc’h, </em>The Swan. The story of Jean de Montfort and his defeat of the French after his return to Brittany. The people of the city had assembled.</p><p>Hermione, spreading out with the other witches and wizards, of Russian and Scandinavian and loyal British extraction, and the special forces teams, could only watch in astonishment at what was a truly medieval spectacle. The wizards of Brittany came to do homage, as troops were put ashore to reinforce their divisions, which switched sides. The Black-and-White flag was hoisted over the Château.</p><p>
  <em> A swan, an overseas swan; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> A swan, an overseas swan; </em>
</p><p>
  <em> At the top of the old tower of the Château d'Armor. </em>
</p><p>Narcissa, witch, pagan, Lady, widow, mother, Duchess, Prime Minister, Regent; Hermione might have loved Bellatrix without her, no, surely would have. But there would have been no happy ending, if she hadn’t refused to give up on her elder sister and her future.</p><p>Now, receiving the homage of Brittany, she had completed her transformation from hunted exile, desperately protecting her son, to one of the most powerful people in the world, and probably the most powerful woman. If fortune and boldness were enough to carry it home, she would found a new pan-British identity in her most ancient family’s vision of what it had meant to be scions of <em> Yr Hen Ogledd. </em></p><p>It was June First, and the papers back home would be declaring it the Glorious First of June, come again.</p><p>Hermione tried to pray, and banish the quiet sense of unease, to ascribe it to the professional duty of a force protection officer, paranoid to every threat under the sun—but it was an uneasy feeling, that the liberation had all been just a bit too easy, that Voldemort could not let his Empire crumble so lightly.</p><p>But on that glorious morning, with the sun banishing the mist off the sea, the pipes welcomed Narcissa to Brest.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Thus concludes “The Matter of Britain”. What will come next is nothing less than “The Matter of Voldemort”, the final full book in our story—the story of what Voldemort has planned, the story of the unkillable Dark Lord, whose power may have suffered terrible blows at the hands of our brave heroines and heroes, but whose dark design has not yet been put paid.</p><p>Our heroines will find that the Matter of Koschei, too, has a second half, and just what the price is, to cheat death.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>"And, Hey Then, Up Go We." is a song mocking certain attitudes during the English Civil War, and how they will end in executions, i.e., a euphemism for a hanging.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0075"><h2>75. With the Dark Lord</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Wither the Dark Lord</strong>
</p><p> </p><p>It was the 11<sup>th</sup> of June, and Ireland was the focus of all the Government. In fact, Narcissa had very little time to settle the matter of Ireland, so she had started at once. The reason for this was the National Conscription Act. She felt that it would be absolutely disastrous, and her entire Cabinet agreed, for it to exempt Ireland. She needed levies of Irish troops to fill out the ranks of the Army, and to encourage a sense of shared purpose between all the nations. Agreeing to the integration of the Armies was critically important to making the League work (with a guarantee that all men conscripted would serve in local regiments, which used their own language as the language of command—though in many cases that would be Spanish or French—serving to assuage the governments, but also, as General Dodson remarked to her, make the new British Army more like the K.u.K. Armee than anything else).</p><p>She’d made Dodson Chief of the General Staff. It wasn’t like they had any other officers of rank who were less compromised, after all. The Goblins preferred the gold standard, but they were practical and understood finance in a way to make any day trader red with envy; they had been more or less running Voldemort’s war economy before she had convinced them to revolt, but under much harsher terms. Now she let them handle the financial matters of the state. They were to maximise the production of war materiel while taking care that at no point hardship should be worse than it was during the Second World War for the common people. There were still those alive who remembered it, so they could provide a fixed point of reference.</p><p>So it came down to Ireland. After cajoling, and with her troops already occupying Ulster, Narcissa had gotten the Irish government to arrive in London for talks immediately, rather than let the issue fester. All the government buildings were still in disarray and they’d ended up taking One Canada Square over for the talks, which also had the advantage of avoiding the appearance of the Irish Government appearing as supplicants at traditional places of English authority. She’d sent a Concorde for them (they had seized four intact on the ground), even though the journey was short enough that it really wasn’t necessary, that had been quickly painted in Irish national colours. After the usual greetings at the airport the convoy of vehicles had reached Canary Wharf district where a banquet was served, and then she had returned to 10 Downing Street—the talks wouldn’t begin until midday on the ‘morrow.</p><p>That was enough time for her to finally visit with both of her sisters at once. They hadn’t all been in the same room at once since the invasion of Britain had begun. Of course there were plenty of good reasons for that. The last of Voldemort’s troops had only retreated from the island proper on the 27<sup> th </sup> of May, when they evacuated positions at Dover, Folkestone and Ramsgate. The Isle of Wight was still occupied by a division of Voldemort’s troops (they had retreated there in great numbers after being cut off from Kent by a thrust of the Black Guards which had reached Brighton on the 5 <sup> th </sup> of May), and it had been Narcissa’s decision to ‘isolate’ them in favour of the greater prize of supporting the defection of Brittany and Galicia, after her military advisors had described a similar military strategy the Americans had used, island-hopping, in the Second World War. Portland Island had been occupied until the 17 <sup> th </sup> by a battalion strength group of Voldemort’s forces, but its storming had been what cleared the use of Portland Harbour as an anchorage for the fleets which had landed troops on the continent.</p><p>The flurry of managing all of these operations with the troops and trying to set the Ship of State right had consumed every one of her days from waking to sleeping, and of sleep she had seen little, with the help of potions. But there was finally a gap, and as an excuse, she wanted her sisters’ counsel now, for these negotiations fed into magical politics as much as muggle. The House of Black had raised them all to be intimately tied into these matters of what it meant to be a British witch.</p><p>And she wanted to remind herself of why, precisely, she had taken on the job. The headaches were overwhelming, as she eased herself down into the chair in front of the fireplace and began to review documents. There would be another fireplace—in the gatehouse—where Andy and Bella would arrive. Her security services would sooner die than let a Floo portal actually be inside of No.10, which was sensible enough. And now, looking forward to a night with her sisters, she still felt called to make as much progress on the briefings and proposed legislation as she could.</p><p>Yes, there was definitely a reason she was doing all of this, and she was proud of it too. <em>Her family had a future. </em></p><p>No regrets.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>“Don’t worry, Delphi. Mother will be back very soon. The Floo network is functioning again, and so I am just going to Floo right in with Aunt Andy to visit Aunt Cissy.” Bellatrix was smiling to her daughter, who was curled up with a book on the couch with Hermione.</p><p>“Mum,” Delphi looked up at Bellatrix, and at Andy, standing next to her older sister. She had an expression of a smart child, trying to express her diffident independence. “I don’t need to worry. I’m here with mummy-Hermione in <em>Ancient House. </em>With our <em>elves. </em>Of course I’ll be fine.” She nodded to herself in confidence.</p><p>“I think she’s got one on you, Bella,” Andy grinned, and Hermione laughed with her. “She’ll be fine, Bella.”</p><p>Bellatrix sighed and huffed. “Oh very well.” In truth, for the past several weeks, she had absolutely refused to leave for anything at all. It was the first time since she was a small child, or perhaps at all, that she had really felt safe in Ancient House, and she had spent all of that time essentially rediscovering it—and reconnecting with her daughter, and in a sense, connecting with Hermione for the first time. They’d done some repairs to the house, made contracts with the locals for the fields, done some decorating—absurdly normal things—and marked the bounds of the lane, Hermione had even participated in the rededicating of the Home Shrine to the Gods.</p><p>In short, it had been a four week long <em>break </em>in the perfect insanity of this War.</p><p>And now her little girl reading on a 19<sup>th</sup> century faux-Egyptian couch, curled up against Hermione, was the reward she had. That and time with her sisters.</p><p>“You’re cute.” Hermione smiled.</p><p>“Mum, Hermione thinks you’re cute!”</p><p>Bellatrix groaned theatrically. “Come on, Andy, get me to the Floo before they gang up on me.”</p><p>Andy was laughing. “As if we won’t…” Still, it was time to go, and she tugged Bellatrix along. Bellatrix, of course, winked to her daughter and waved as they departed.</p><p>Together, the two Black sisters stepped from one fireplace into another. The guards came to attention. Bellatrix waved her hand dismissively. “Nonsense, I’m not in uniform.”</p><p>“M’lady is a Lady of the Realm,” the Doorman offered.</p><p><em>Of course Cissy has a Doorman in front of her Floo. </em> “Yes, yes. Lady Bellatrix Black and Lady Andromeda” Bellatrix paused for a moment, remembering that, in fact, this was not the old days, “ <em>Tonks</em> for Her Grace the Duchess of Lancaster.”</p><p>“This way, Ladies. You are expected.”</p><p>Bellatrix looked around at all the décor. Most of it had been freshly installed by Narcissa, so it looked more Narcissa than she would have expected if she hadn’t known that; No.10 had not been important during Voldemort’s regime, and the furnishings suffered accordingly… She couldn’t help herself: “Cissy!”</p><p>“The Cabinet Room, no less,” Andy murmured as she stepped in, too, but even though she was more primed by exposure to muggle culture to take this place seriously, she couldn’t help but grin and follow the eldest up to Narcissa, who ignored them for a moment longer to finish signing something and handing it off to an aide, before turning to them with a genuine expression of affection. She also looked tired. “Bella, Andy. Welcome. Let’s go somewhere more comfortable.” Narcissa rose. “I only had you brought here because I was trying to work until the last minute.”</p><p>“You’re as bad as Blair, working at the Cabinet Room table,” Andy offered with a wry grin.</p><p>“One still feels bad for him, in the sense that he had no idea what he was dealing with,” Cissy mused, leading them up into the tiny private apartment. Bellatrix knew better than to speak about that, and so she held her tongue. Soon the three sisters were ensconced in a private parlour, away from the Cabinet Room and the State Drawing Rooms.</p><p>“Bring one of the Khvanchkara bottles,” she instructed to one of the servants, then turned to her sisters. “A selection of Georgian wines was sent by President Nazarbayev to re-stock the wine cellar, and I do want to celebrate the Alliance.”</p><p>A crooked grin touched Bella’s face. She couldn’t resist. “Are you sure, considering…”</p><p>“I am perfectly aware that my son is involved with Lady Larissa Naryshkina,” Narcissa undercut her elder sister’s incipient teasing with a very bemused look of her own—Bellatrix couldn’t help but pout for a moment even though that was exactly what Narcissa wanted to see. <em>How does she always find everything out? </em></p><p>“You know it’s serious and they’ve…”</p><p>“What I don’t need to know, Bella, is details of my son’s love life. He’s a man grown and that’s his business, though I think it’s very important for a future alliance between the British and Russian wizarding communities for their marriage. There’s absolutely not a single hindrance to the match on the wizarding or the muggle sides—nobody would think the slightest in muggle society of the heir to the Duchy of Lancaster marrying a Russian aristocrat from an old Tatar Boyar lineage—or at least they <em>shouldn’t—</em>and of course, in wizarding society, we are setting the definition of what’s fine and what’s not.”</p><p>“Cissy,” Andy observed as the wine came out for them, and was corked and poured. “Most of muggle society had moved beyond that… Though I acknowledge that in the highest ranks of old blood it would still matter. Which I suppose we are. Still getting used to thinking in those terms again.”</p><p>“Oh, don’t play the bourgeoisie with me, Andy,” Bella couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “I’ve seen the way you dress and the way you drive.”</p><p>Andy held her glass pensively for a moment, but then smiled. “Fair enough. I suppose that was never what I was escaping, anyway. And in that regard, well, Russian matches were looked down upon, Cissy, for the fact they married muggle aristocracy, but they weren’t considered …”</p><p>“Indeed,” Narcissa hummed. “But most importantly, it will make Draco happy, and it will set the stage for the tone I want for the family. And all without any prodding. I’m very thankful in how he’s matured.” A distant look. “Lucius would, in fact, be very proud. He’d have adapted to the circumstances, and been immensely pleased that Draco would one day be the Duke of the County Palatine of Lancashire. I think he’d accept all the changes to the magical world to see it.”</p><p>“And I think,” Andy looked sharply at Bellatrix, then, and Bella felt herself freezing for a moment with the raspberry profile of the wine on her tongue, “that my Edward would be very happy to see that my elder sister, become brave enough to escape Voldemort, and could sit with me like this, and most of all could have her own courage to come out—and be engaged to a muggleborn. You have…”</p><p><em> Oh, this is too sappy. And maudlin. </em>Bella leaned it and pulled them both into a hug with her. “Come on! We’ve won. And I’m just as happy to be here.”</p><p>Andy paused, and for a moment Bella hesitated, wondering if that had been the right ahead, but then she nodded and grinned. “Well, we are indeed all here. Tonks has Teddy with her, we’re the ones with Ancient House, I’ve got Hogwarts, Bella has another woman, and Cissy has the entire bloody country.”</p><p>“Well, I will acknowledge that we exceeded expectations in the Slytherin yearbooks.” Narcissa raised her glass, and Bella raised her own with Andy’s too. A light clink, the wine working a little—warm and pleasant inside, though with the nuclear winter effects it was hardly <em>warm </em>at night in early June. “To Exceeding Expectations.”</p><p>“I think creating an island the size of Jutland in the middle of the North Sea puts the two of you a bit ahead of me, though, I haven’t been Headmistress for fifty years yet, either,” Andy offered after the toast. “You’ll rule the present, Narcissa, but I’ll shape the youth.”</p><p>“Careful, you’ll tempt me to be my own Education Secretary.”</p><p>Bellatrix snorted. “Look at you, Cissy, you haven’t enough time to sleep as it is.”</p><p>“There are potions for that. Hmm. I am recreating the position as just a single Ministerial office—it’s quite amazing, before Voldemort’s takeover, how many times it was reorganised…”</p><p>“Am I going to have to spend the night listening to the two of you discuss education policy?”</p><p>“I think,” Andy winked, “It’s more like the two of us will enjoy watching you spend the rest of the night complaining about a discussion of education policy.”</p><p>“I have a lovely wife waiting. I could just Floo back.”</p><p>“Delphini,” Narcissa said very seriously, without a hint of emotion getting to her face, “is in on it with us. If you come back home instead of enjoying time with your sisters, she’ll wake up and come into your and Hermione’s bedroom at midnight. Anyway, I want you to see the rooms I had prepared for both of you; I think they’re very nice, and I very much want you to stay whenever you can. Of course, they're in No.11; there's not actually much private space here.”</p><p>“You win.” Bellatrix relaxed, really genuinely relaxed. The number of times that she could claim to have done so as an adult were precious few. They passed the rest of the evening in laughter, and for a moment, one might imagine their faces were young again.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The morning saw them served a breakfast with sausage, beans and bread with strong tea. Narcissa was making a point of expecting nothing fancy, though they did eat well, for a country under rationing. But she had to fight to avoid cracking a grin at Bella’s arrival, her dishevelled appearance and fantastically bad morning hair (this in a rather glamorous woman who was, in fact, an absolutely perfect dresser—Narcissa gave her sister that) could successfully make any event more informal. “Good morning, Bella.”</p><p>Andy, conversely, had overdone it. She was wearing a witch’s robes, and well she should since she was the Headmistress of Hogwarts—Narcissa wasn’t expecting the entire family to start wearing business suits—but the ones she’d chosen also very much reflected the fact that she was still thinking in terms of ‘meeting the Prime Minister’ as being on the same terms as meeting the Minister of Magic.</p><p>But the warmth of her smile reminded Narcissa of just how nice it was to have them all back. The blonde of the three waited for all to sit, and breakfast to be presented, though she thought it her privilege with her workload, to start drinking her tea before her older sisters. “Sleep was comfortable, I trust?”</p><p>“Oh, incredibly so! Did you drug me?” Bella cocked her head at Cissy, and younger could only roll her eyes at elder.</p><p>“I see you’re perfectly chipper this morning.”</p><p>“I assumed you might have a large stockpile of sleeping potions at this point,” Bellatrix teased, before picking up her own tea. “There, there, now with this I’ll keep going from the faking it into the actually being awake…”</p><p>“So, while Bella talks to herself, what about <em>your </em>sleep, Cissy?” Andy asked.</p><p>“I’ve been worried about the negotiations with Ireland,” she decided to admit. “Of course, we reoccupied Ulster with our troops as part of supporting the liberation, but really it’s to keep the IRA and the Loyal Orders from shooting at each other. The ironic thing is that the Irish government is fully prepared to support my policy. The ‘League’--we avoid using the term ‘Union’--of the Celtic Nations is even popular. The issue is the Crown. Brittany and Galicia, this is not a problem. People there are not thinking of the League in those terms, they’ve never known the oppression the Irish did. And it is an ugly, black stain on the history of the relations between the Nations of Britain. The Irish point-blank told me that they would agree to everything—if I was the President, and we weren’t restoring the monarchy. But that simply isn’t an option. I took this position to retrench our way of life and provide for the whole of our nations, both muggle and magical, and uphold our culture; not to become a populist demagogue, tearing down what little tradition is left.”</p><p>Bellatrix tipped back in her chair, pausing over a bite of sausage. “So what are you going to do about it?”</p><p>“I raised, privately, the prospect of making an arrangement where we have a Viceroy, or Governor General, for the Celtic League. His Majesty is essentially running the government of Oceania, and is interested in settling the constitutional issues there. His leadership during the War has made him enormously popular, to the point that Republicanism is a dead force in Australia and New Zealand, and many of the surrounding smaller nations and populations are clamouring to join them. I hazarded the idea to him that ultimately one of his sons could be the King of each realm in that case.”</p><p>“It’s an awful idea. The very same traditions you want to protect,” Bellatrix sighed, “they need the King here. He’s the symbol of unity, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to create. The people are used to his presence just like the people of Australia were, before, used to the absence of the King, and honestly that helped promote Republicanism. Here? Yes, breaking down the traditional order further would hurt. People are looking forward to the return of the King. It’s part of triumphing over Voldemort’s regime. It’s part of the very returning to tradition that you want to encourage. Having Governor General will strike a discordant note.”</p><p>“It was a unity that never worked for the Irish,” Andy interjected.</p><p>“It does in the magical world.” Bella stuck out her tongue at her sister.</p><p>“And now we have to merge the two, and do so peacefully,” Narcissa rejoined. “The reality is many Irish believe passionately in their Republic. Of course, we are making constitutional arrangements so that the Celtic nations cannot be outvoted in governance by the Anglo-Saxon nation. Essentially equal seats will allow a unified Celtic voice an equal say in the course and affairs of State. But selling that is a great challenge. You are right, though, Bellatrix. It’s quite difficult to imagine a long-term situation in which the King does not return to Britain. I need my Regency to end, anyway, it’s a matter of finding the appropriate Viceroy until the King does return; but since he has a legitimate cause in the war to remain away, it might conceivably be some years even without such a formal plan, and that may help.” She mused. “It would be good to have an Irishman as Viceroy, until the King returns at the end of the War, at least. That is something the people could find acceptable.”</p><p>“Perhaps.” Bella munched on another bite of food. “I think the Irish are in a more precarious position than they realise. No fault of their own—they found a way to preserve their nation mostly intact—but the reality is that they collaborated extensively with the regime. How about you take me there today? Even though they’ve arrested some of the Ministers who committed the most serious crimes, the reality is, that government has plenty of collaborators in it. They might need to be reminded of how much thin ice they’re on. And even Sinn Féin had plenty of collaborators.”</p><p>“It’s a unity government that’s coming, but perhaps I am <em>not </em>interested in excessive visibility for you, Bella,” Narcissa couldn’t help but sigh. “I’m also not yet at the point of intimidating them.”</p><p>“But why not? They have it good. Their language, culture, autonomy, national identity will all be protected and enhanced by your government, they’re going to occupy a privileged position in the last fully industrialised nation after the apocalypse. Show them just how bleak the other choice is. Nobody will want to trade with a pariah such as a nation which was recognised and supported by Voldemort’s regime from the beginning. The Bretons and Galicians understood this; they’re better off under you, Cissy, than under their previous muggle governments, and they know that only revenge and hatred and bloodshed would attend any outcome other than presenting you with a blank cheque and having you write the terms on it.”</p><p>“My popularity exceeds ninety percent in both countries,” Narcissa acknowledged. “According to the internal government polls, at least, but they’re the only ones at the moment.”</p><p>“Hah, you should keep it that way.”</p><p>“We <em>are </em>trying to deemphasize party politics,” Narcissa acknowledged wryly at Bella’s continued cheerful insouciance over what was a very serious issue (though she felt that Bella’s advice about the monarchy was on-point, having thought about it more, and quite succinct and intelligent—as usual for her), but then looked to Andy, and frowned. “Is something a-matter?”</p><p>“There’s powerful magic in the air, it feels ominous,” the middle Black sister whispered.</p><p>Bella felt it, and frowning, her face slowly lost its insouciant expression.</p><p>Narcissa tested the current of magic with her own wand as well, and frowned. “I was going to send you both back to Ancient House, but since I can’t delay the meeting with the Irish, actually… would you accompany me?”</p><p>“Yes, I think we three should stick together today,” Andy agreed. “I think it <em>very much.</em>”</p><p>There was an ill omen in the air. The city was on edge, with a portent, a charge in the air, that no-one could quite place.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0076"><h2>76. Vengeance is Mine</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b> Vengeance is Mine </b>
</p><p> </p><p>The three sisters left No.10 Downing Street after breakfast, having changed to the appropriate clothes for the event (in Bella’s case, a military uniform, business suit for Cissy, and wizarding robes for Andy, ironically) for the expansive back of a Rolls-Royce limousine. Andy and Cissy sat in the very back row facing forward, and Bellatrix piled in facing backwards, which didn’t seem to bother her at all. As they started off, she looked through the pockets and in the wine-cooler.</p><p>“No mimosas?”</p><p>“Mimosas have to be mixed anyway, and no, Bella, I don’t want to be seen drinking an alcoholic beverage with orange juice in it in the middle of major rationing when most people in the country haven’t seen citrus fruit in years.”</p><p>“Every other time I’m been in a limousine in London, there’s been mimosas.”</p><p>Narcissa looked at her sister levelly. “Quite. Stop playing around, Bella.”</p><p>Bellatrix flashed her a brilliant grin which suggested she had very, very much been playing that up for effect.</p><p>That got her an eye-roll from Narcissa, even though Narcissa expected that had been the intention all along. “They’ve updated the Bible,” she continued drolly; “instead of saying ‘the first shall be the last’, now it says ‘the oldest shall be the youngest.’”</p><p>“<em>Hmf.</em>” Bellatrix stuck her tongue out.</p><p>“Thank you for proving the point.”</p><p>Bellatrix smiled airily at her. “When the situation feels this tense, a little humour is called for.”</p><p>“You’d say that even at the mouth of Hell.”</p><p>For a moment, Bella’s face lost her light-hearted expression, and Narcissa regretted saying that. “Perhaps I already have,” Bella mused softly, and fell silent for a moment. But it was harder than that to silence Bellatrix Black. “Yet, for all that, the humour still matters.”</p><p>It wasn’t like she was <em> wrong. </em>In Narcissa’s experience, those in the military with a black sense of humour were the ones who stayed the most cheerful in their hearts, in fact.</p><p>While the two bantered, Andromeda, the quiet one, the middle child, the one who had been silent until the day she was brave, had remained quiet. Then she looked up, having mulled something over. “Narcissa, I think I’ve identified an opportunity for you in your negotiations with the Irish.”</p><p>“Oh?” Now both Narcissa and Bellatrix had their full attention fixed on her. “Do go on, Andy,” the younger Black offered.</p><p>“You’re not framing the situation right. You need to, especially using Brittany and Galicia as an example, frame the Irish agreeing to the League as being a little-EU, not a large-Britain. The European Union was extremely popular in Ireland. But, the European Union, unless it was arrested in its course, also led almost inevitably to a central currency, banking, governance structure, unified military and ultimately to European Federalism.”</p><p>“I admit, I paid little attention to the European Union in the nineties. By the time muggle politics were extremely important for me to learn, it had already been destroyed by Voldemort,” Narcissa acknowledged, now fully fixed on the middle sister. <em>As said. When Andy does decide to speak up, it’s best to listen.</em></p><p>“Precisely. But, in that time, it was seen as a way to solve the Irish Question, and promote greater integration in the British Isles without compromising sovereignty—even though it definitely compromised sovereignty. A Celtic League is an easy sell in Ireland—a Celtic league in which English ‘counts’ and is a part of it is a very tough sell, even though that’s the way the wizarding world in the British Isles has operated the entire time,” Andy explained. “However, if you package your proposed federalism as essentially being a little-EU, where the Crown is, in part, making it palatable to the English, not subjecting the Irish, then you’re playing into something that was popular and is now part of an idealised past in Ireland, because pre-war is an idealised past everywhere at this point.”</p><p><em> Andy had taken a very different course in life, but never let anyone doubt my middle sister is a Slytherin, and very intelligent, </em>Narcissa thought, and smiled. “Thank you, Andy. I will play it if it seems to fit with the tone and pace of negotiations. Bella?”</p><p>Their elder sister grinned. “You can take the Pureblood out of Slytherin, but you can’t take the Slytherin out of a Pureblood...”</p><p>The groans were surely a sign her awful puns were working. Perhaps they all indulged in them so much because that ill sense of unease had not yet left the air.</p><p> </p><p>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>What could one say about the course of the war? Dolohov certainly never imagined that it would all come to this. But who had really had the ability to imagine the course of events which brought them so close to ruination, after so long riding high?</p><p>Their arms had won renown and inspired fear and terror across the entire globe. Their armies had rendered insignificant the actions of prior conquerors. Wizards and witches all over the world tripped over themselves to pledge allegiance to the Morsmordre. Their Lord and Master seemed like he must surely be victorious.</p><p>Slowly the tide had turned. In Oceania, in China, in Southeast Asia, allies of the Morsmordre began to suffer defeats. Their own armies found themselves stoutly opposed in Anatolia before the gates of Ankara, and upon the Russian steppe. Again and again, they lost the chance to put away the Russian resistance. Then Bellatrix had swept down to the Caucasus…</p><p>And defected.</p><p>Bellatrix. Pretty much every single Death Eater wanted her, but among men, she only ever wanted Voldemort. Her own husband, she supported with her considerable wealth and ignored his indulging in whores, both before and after Azkaban. She was probably happier that way. They probably <em>both </em>were.</p><p>Dolohov imagined she’d been pleased when he bought it from that enchanted bomb. He, like most of the old Death Eaters, had also known that the Dark Lord had given Bellatrix a child. Nobody had foreseen it. But perhaps they should have. Bellatrix was from an old and proud family, and the Dark Lord didn’t really love her. He didn’t really love <em>anyone. </em>Not even, perhaps certainly not even, the child that he had given to her.</p><p>And she was rather interested in witches, anyway, that was the point. <em>Push her aside often enough… </em>So she had begun what was objectively the greatest act of treason in history. Bernadotte, that was a name for a man to compare with Bellatrix in the muggle world—Dolohov was a cultured man, and he knew enough about military history now that it was all their business.</p><p>Judas with tits. That was a more common epithet. Actually, Dolohov expected that they were overextended anyway and even without her defection they were going to suffer ugly reverses. They were having to rebuild the infrastructure they had destroyed to keep the armies advancing, after all, and with the damage of the nuclear attacks that had become a serious challenge. It was just that Bellatrix had defected, the entire house of cards had gone crumbling down…</p><p>And so there they were, in Diyarbakir. The front line was less than 30km from Tatvan, on the southwest shore of Lake Van—if their enemies had not poured everything into stopping them, and the Indians had not launched their ferocious attack on the flank those few months ago, they should have already taken this true-Ararat. They were only a hundred and sixty kilometres from the front here, but the air raids had died off when the Dark Lord had taken to personally eliminating them.</p><p>He knew that it was just a question of reaching the mountain. The Dark Lord could have all the power he pleased then, if he learned to harness what was within it. They just had to get there before the Army ran out of supplies, now that they were cut off from Britain. The rest of Europe would help, but, it was in far worse shape than Britain had been, their industrial power-house stolen from them by the machinations of an altogether worse foe than Bellatrix Black.</p><p>
  <em>Among those three sisters, Narcissa had always been the most dangerous. </em>
</p><p>He arrived at the audience hall of his Lord and Master, now, as he had been summoned. Increasingly, Dolohov was handling the day-to-day operations of the Army, as Voldemort was consumed more and more by wild fantasies of revenge and betrayal.</p><p>And today’s summons was unusual. He didn’t have the faintest idea of what it was to be about. But he had no fear. Regardless of how awful a death it was, Azkaban had left him unafraid to die.</p><p> </p><p>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>In the end, Voldemort always knew that he could trust no-one. He may have sometimes felt differently, but those times were wrong, and really, he was certain he had been aware of it always. The Knights of Walpurgis, his Death Eaters, had been inadequate for the task. The world was their oyster, and still they squandered the power that had been given to them all.</p><p>He closed eyes now more reptilian than human. The pleasures of the flesh had come to mean little. Nothing mattered except for the power of the Dark Arts. He had devoted himself to their study for seventy years or more now, it was hard to remember exactly how long. His very continued existence was a testament to their power.</p><p>Giving Bellatrix the seed of his body had been a mistake. But when the other Death Eaters had been taken, after the Battle in the Hall of Mysteries, her loyalty, her desperate attraction, seemed to deserve some kind of reward. Even Voldemort, though, knew that she didn’t really enjoy the act. She had appreciated it for the validation it had given her. His lover. His foremost lieutenant.</p><p>Of course she had repaid him with betrayal. His father had repaid her mother—who had given him the most priceless gift imaginable, making his child a wizard instead of a muggle—with hatred. Bellatrix had repaid him with treason. She had wanted more for the child than the child simply existing. It had been about her own power, not love for him.</p><p>Well, in a vague sense, he could respect that. He would make her suffer the worst fate which had ever been suffered in the whole history of humanity, if the opportunity permitted (Bellatrix wasn’t stupid, and like enough would manage to die, but one should at least make plans). But, she had played him very well. She had made him everything that she was…</p><p>...But unless he ruled the world, nothing would be able to do could extinguish her memory. That was a very irritating fact. Her treason had been so grand that she would remain as the greatest treason in history—she’d displace Cassius or Brutus in one of Satan’s mouths for sure (likely Cassius), and infamy was certainly only second to fame.</p><p>And Malfoy, Malfoy, Madame Malfoy… She had led Lucius into treason. The entire <em>Black Family </em>was hopelessly tainted. It should be wiped from existence. Little Delphini included; when he was triumphant, he would be sure of removing that mistake from existence.</p><p>But they had wounded him, and it was a wound of the kind that the Potter boy could not have <em>hoped </em>to inflict. The prophecy had been undone, broken by his power. The boys had died, and with them, had died any hope of his defeat. But so far, he had not gained the power to control the world outright. The honeyed tongue of a Slytherin, the promises, the humiliation, the sly suggestions, the curses and the bribes. He had been able to manipulate to extend his power, as was proper and natural for the Heir of Slytherin. But he had never been able to extend his power <em>absolutely, </em>in a way that had brought him to natural dominion over the whole of the globe.</p><p><em>If you open the Door just a little, and then you can close it again, you can take all of its power. </em>Without that power, his Empire was vulnerable. He could not be everywhere at once, he was not omnipotent or even omniscient. Narcissa Malfoy and Bellatrix the Traitor had delivered a terrible blow to him, and denied him his wonderful Britain, taken it out of his hands and put it into their hands, into the hands of traitors, because he could not be everywhere at once.</p><p>But the power whispered to him, soft and comfortable, soothing and pleasing, and it promised to him the whole world, if only he let it in. Just a little.</p><p>His mortal Empire was collapsing around him. He let it in, just a little. And it gave him the power of revenge. The power to retaliate.</p><p>“Antonin, you are here, Good.” He was barely aware, thinking of the power, feeling the distant power, feeling the consequences of it, barely aware of his own surroundings. “I wish you to reach out to the Lords Lieutenant in the continent, and tell them that they are to magnify the propaganda value of what is now happening in Britain. We have lost Britain—for now. We will regain it soon. Once we have Ararat. Until then, we will terrify Europe into Europe.”</p><p>“My Lord, what <em>is </em>happening in Britain?”</p><p>Voldemort laughed. “My dear fellow—nothing less than revenge. A foretaste of the power I shall soon have.”</p><p>There were few finer pleasures than revenge, and so much the better against a traitor of blood and oath. <em>Do you think you will be famous, Bella? When I am done with you, not even the memory will remain!</em></p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>The thirty-six foot high ceiling of One Canada Square’s 90,000 square foot lobby reflected, as the rest of the building did, the epitome of the power of the old British financial class. It was clad in fine Italian marbles. Narcissa had gone up to the meeting room. Bellatrix and Andromeda had descended past the terracotta artwork and settled into a former lounge in the basement retail area, which was now serving to cater the talks.</p><p>“Kept nice and away from the talks, aren’t we?” Andy offered. They were drinking some tea in a corner booth, and Bellatrix occasionally glanced to the security personnel, who were mostly unobtrusive.</p><p>“Yes, well, that’s mostly my fault, Andy. Though never forget that Cissy has always wanted her big day. If she can make this League last long enough for the biographies to be written about her, she’ll have succeeded better than any other witch before.”</p><p>“Well, Circe.”</p><p>“Being a demigoddess is cheating,” Bella rolled her eyes.</p><p>Andy <em>Hmphed </em>and folded her arms. “I suppose we should be thankful to little Cissy forevermore, anyway; she’s responsible for all of this.”</p><p>“I do admit that her becoming Prime Minister made my future much easier. And I suppose she’s grounded enough, when it comes to her ego...”</p><p>“She inherited the name through marriage, she never became a Malfoy,” Andy laughed. “No peacocks.”</p><p>“Gods, you were in exile from Society, working as a magical barrister somewhere, and you’d heard about Lucius’ peacocks?”</p><p>“Arguing cases before the Wizengamot,” Andy waved a hand. “But it was very hard to get work, as I was blacklisted, so in the end I settled for a Ministry position.”</p><p>“I’m sorry.” What else do you say to the fact you believed in the ideology, for almost all of your adult life, which gave your sister such pain? And oh, you had worked yourself up into hating her, or thinking you did, anyway, for most of that same time. The look on her face must have been awful from the way Andy pursed her lips.</p><p>“I think you’re sincere about it,” she allowed, and leaned back. “Oh Gods, Bella, but it doesn’t matter now. None of us turned into a peacock, after all.”</p><p>“Heh, I…” Bellatrix trailed off. She shot a look in the direction of the security detail men. ‘<em>Some kind of incident near </em><em>the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park…’</em></p><p>Her expression froze. Her stomach constricted. “Andy, you were the best of us at Divination. Care trying to see something in the very near future?”</p><p>Andromeda was frowning. “That odd sense out we’ve been having today? The whole reason we’re here and not back at Ancient House… Sure. It’s always easier to see something relevant to the future when it’s very close to happening already.” Her eyes flashed to her older sister again, though. “Of course, Bella, if I must say, it’s really rare of you to give a fig about divination.”</p><p>“I’m worried,” Bella said neutrally. “And we might as well do something to pass the time.”</p><p>Andy reached into her bag of holding and pulled out three bundles of herbs, smartly selecting two groups from each and weaving them together. The barkeep stayed well away when she declared “<em>Pyromantika,</em>” and set it alight on the table, gazing intently into the flames. Bellatrix couldn’t see a thing, but then she hadn’t cast the spell, either. <em> Pyromancy. </em>Quick, difficult, but Andy was good at such things; the herbs were easily obtainable. It might show something, it might not. Probably it would show nothing.</p><p>But Andy, responsible Andy, looked as hard into it as she could, and from the quiet, subdued expression on her face, seemed to be seeing something serious. Or at least taking it very seriously, indeed.</p><p>At least, Andy settled back, shaking her head. “Oh Gods, I’m sorry, Bella, but that wasn’t helpful at all. I saw something very clearly, but it was a city, maybe even Constantinople I think but <em> not exactly </em> Constantinople, and by Constantinople I don’t mean Istanbul, but <em> old </em> Constantinople, in Roman times, you know? But, it was not quite. And there was a woman, of greyish skin, red hair, black robes, cat-eyes, not quite human. She watched as the streets flooded with the dead, the living dead, Inferi I mean; and with them spread black tendrils, a cloud, a fog through the city. This woman was a fell sorceress to be sure, for she had an ancient <em> Rabdos, </em> and with it called down red lightning from the sky with such strength and power as to drive back this beast back. But the streets were flooded with the Dead.”</p><p><em> Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. </em>Bellatrix leapt to her feet. “Andy, get up to Narcissa and tell her that Voldemort is attacking, do it now. That was – fuck,” another reality, another time, another world, the monster, the horror, the God of the Dementors was surely not limited to some small measure of sidereal space like this single planet in this dimension! A vision of another doom to warn of the impending doom.</p><p>She was never happier to be in the uniform that Cissy had started to make her wear.</p><p>“Bella, what <em>is it!?</em>” Andy asked, hurrying after.</p><p>“The dead. Voldemort is raising the dead.” She turned to the confused commander of the security detail, who came to attention to salute. “Get me to your comms section. Now.”</p><p>“General..?”</p><p>“That’s an order. <em>Andy, get up to Cissy and let her know.</em>” She knew the mettle of the man that she had sold her life to, and taken the mark of. He would not make a pact with a Horror like the God of the Dementors for a small price. If he settled on revenge, his revenge would be epic in scale. And it made perfect sense for him to leave something behind, but she had known, in her time as his Lieutenant, of no preparations. Perhaps he had finally reached Ararat—she should have liked to think the Russians would have provided more warning, would have called them back for the fight—and perhaps this was just … The smallest measure of what chilled her to the bone, of what made her remember savagely miserable times in Azkaban, where misery seemed all consuming, where the waves were unending. Her eyes gleamed darkly as she waved to Andy, who took off without another word, and followed the nervous Captain to the command centre for the talks.</p><p>She waltzed in, acknowledging the salutes of the Guards, and reached out to grab one of the radio microphones. “Put this on a general broadcast in the clear.”</p><p>“Yes, General!”</p><p>“This is General Bellatrix Black, British Army. The Government has directed,” <em>sorry, Cissy, but you’ll forgive me for that, </em>“that I instruct all of the military and civilian security forces in the city to mandate the immediate enforcement of a general curfew, including by our allied Russian forces in the London Metropolitan Area. We have advance intelligence of a rapidly developing attack by the forces of the Morsmordre. All civilians are to immediately seek shelter in the nearest building and lock and barricade all entrances and move to higher levels within buildings if possible. They are not to come out until the government gives them the All-Clear. All security forces should muster according to their local commands in tight battalion strength formations covered by at least two Wizarding folk. All wizards in the city must <em>absolutely </em>repair to the positions of the security forces and provide support. Under the provisions of the State of Emergency now in effect, this includes civilians—anyone with a wand over the age of fifteen. Children should be directed through the Floo network to any destination in a rural area. This message must be repeated immediately through all technological and magical channels as widely as possible.”</p><p>She released the pickup button on the mic, and slowly handed it back to the radio operator. “Did that go out?” Bellatrix asked, seeming to faintly shake, not from nervousness but from energy.</p><p>“Yes it did, General Black.”</p><p>“Thank you.” She closed her eyes. <em>Gods. Gods Gods Gods. </em>Once upon a time she had set out to create a Dark Utopia at His side...</p><p>“General, I…” A stuttering voice in the background. She didn’t turn around to face him. “General, they’re reporting that the dead are rising in Tower Hamlets Cemetery. They’re rising, it’s a bloody zombie apocalypse out there, God help us!”</p><p>
  <em> Now I’ve got to fucking stop him, even if it kills me. For Delphini. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> For Hermione. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> And now you’ve got to keep your sisters alive. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Save fucking London. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Fuck. </em>
</p><p>She opened her eyes, and looked at her left arm. Reached out, ripped the glove off, revealing the golden hand underneath. Flexed it. Clenched it. For the first time she was proud, proud that it was <em> anything other than </em>the Dark Mark. Fuck Him.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0077"><h2>77. Dead London</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Thoughts seemed to take too long when seconds counted. Bellatrix was standing there in uniform, one hand resting close to her wand holster, staring at the map of London. The radios were crackling, messages in the sharp, clipped sounds of military speech, Russian or English it didn’t matter, they both had a style, euphemisms and code words meant to speed up speech, to accelerate it, to convey meaning in a tight, precise slang impenetrable to the civilian.</p><p>She understood it all now. Better that way, easier. It was her profession. Her fate. Her life had been decided in advance for her, she’d never had the chance to want a career. Being a magical DJ probably wouldn’t have been allowed by the Ministry, especially in those times. Soldier. Lieutenant. General. That was a progression, all right. It was her life and probably how she was going to die.</p><p>She was comfortable with it.</p><p>“I need visibility.” Her voice was speaking and she barely even noticed.</p><p>“We’re connecting a television feed through to a drone over the city now, General.”</p><p>“Do we go or stay, General?” A Colonel came up urgently, after saluting; it was her call, even though she wasn’t in the actual chain of command for these men, not part of their Order of Battle for the London Garrison, she was the ranking officer here and that was what mattered. Had that crossed sword with baton on her shoulders, the pip, the Crown.</p><p>“<span><span>We hold,” she answered, automatically. The image of the boiling mass of Inferi advancing through the streets which appeared from the static-lined feed being broadcast from the drone didn’t change things a single wit. She expected that. </span></span><em><span>Static. Hmm. Static. </span></em></p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Broad-based magical working across the entire city. Powerful enough to interfere with broadcast transmissions. I don’t know how he did it, but yes, that’s needed for him to initiate this kind of horror, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>she decided. “We hold,” she repeated, to reassure them. “You’ve got a QRF for the talks?” </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>They needed the Quick Reaction Force, or else the Canary Wharf districts would be quickly overrun. And the feed showed plenty of civilians fleeing in their direction, which made perfect sense. Water and Inferi didn’t mix. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Did even muggles know that? </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>She wondered.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“A battalion of one of the Russian air mobile units, General.”</p><p>“<span><span>Activate it, now. </span></span><span><span>I want it here immediately. </span></span><span><span>And get me their commander on the line.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Major Bliznyuk on your line, General.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Major,” Bellatrix spoke, seamlessly switching to Russian. “</span></span><span><span>Do you have any spare helicopters?” She was looking tautly at the map. </span></span></p><p>“Yes, General. Two Mi-8s and a single Galina are ready, but in excess of capacity for the battalion. We’ll be underway in five minutes.”</p><p>“<span><span>Good. But I need you to send those helicopters to Greenwich Park. The 216</span></span><sup><span><span>th</span></span></sup><span><span> Military Engineering Company is there and I need them with all of their charges. </span></span><span><span>And by the way, make sure you have all of your incendiary and tracer ammunition. You’ll need it.</span></span><span><span>”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>General</span></span><span><span>! We are getting underway at once. </span></span><span><span>Understood.</span></span><span><span>”</span></span></p><p>“See you soon, Major.” She lowered the handset and looked to the doors. The tapping of soles on the fine granite had warned her. “Cissy?” Andromeda was right behind her.</p><p>Narcissa was terrifically composed. She admitted no fear or concern. Nor did she complain about the public informality. “Bellatrix, He’s raised the dead across the city?”</p><p>“He has.”</p><p>“Are you taking measures?”</p><p>“<span><span>I ordered everyone to seek shelter, barricade themselves in place, for all the troops and police to form into battalion strength groups, with wizards for cover,” she answered with a shrug. “A lot of them are coming here, Cissy. It’s not a bad thing; the QRF was already laid in, and I’ve se</span></span><span><span>nt for sappers, we can take out the bridges and slow them down, Inferi can’t swim.” </span></span></p><p>“What about London, Bellatrix?”</p><p>“We need to get everyone we can onto the south bank of the Thames, I’m about to issue orders for a general mobilisation of sappers, we’ll rig every single bridge.”</p><p>“Just how I needed to start my premiership,” Narcissa muttered under her breath, having stepped up to Bella’s side.</p><p>“<span><span>Better than dead people,” Bella said, all </span></span><em><span>sotto-voice, </span></em><span><span>under her own breath in response. “</span></span><span><span>I want a detail of police out,” she pitched her voice to carry. “There’s lots of people fleeing this way, and the Jubilee line runs to the south bank in both directions.” It had barely managed to be opened under Voldemort’s regime, the eastern extension being a pressing topic of conversation in the days before the nuclear exchange, in the Death Eater Councils she remembered. “Get them down onto trains which are to go one stop, let them off, and return as fast as they can. Same thing for the Docklands branch to Greenwich. Don’t hesitate, we don’t have the time.”</span></span></p><p>Did her sisters’ faces glimmer with pride? Perhaps, just perhaps.</p><p>But Andy was thinking, Andy was always thinking. “What about the City itself?”</p><p>“Well, they didn’t bury people in it, so there’s none there yet,” Bellatrix answered, looking as now little black flags started to pop up on the map in front of her representing the positions of the advancing horde. “Cissy, can you talk to the Goblins?”</p><p>“<span><span>I was already thinking of that,” she answered as she started to turn away. “They’re the one force which may be quickly efficacious in dealing with this threat.” </span></span><span><span>Obviously any fire would do, but it wasn’t normal for every single bullet in a modern military to be incendiary or a tracer. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Thank you!” Bella called after her. Then, got a little grin on her face. “Well, maybe another.” An idea lights her mind. Once, she wouldn’t touch this. Voldemort didn’t want it, and it seemed vaguely sacrilegious. The only thing left that was </span></span><em><span>her’s. </span></em><span><span>Now she used it freely, because family was worth saving. </span></span></p><p>“Bella?”</p><p>“<span><span>I’ll save Cissy’s bridges,” she muttered. “Has anyone got some tea?” </span></span></p><p>The declaration, the request, with all its casual confidence, helped the command post to relax, helped morale pick up just a bit. Someone pressed a cuppa to her. “Here you go, General.”</p><p>“Chiswell street first, we’ve got the least time there…” She cleared her throat. “What kind of air have we got up?”</p><p>“I’ve got you a squadron of Rooks, General. That’s it. The rest are still scrambling.”</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She looked to the Colonel whose command she had cheerfully usurped and turned into her headquarters for coordinating the entire defence. “No, that’s not a problem. We’re going to do this right. I want every available ground attack aeroplane in southern Britain. And I want them bombed up with fuel-air, incendiaries, do you understand? Every one we’ve got. Now as for those Rooks, I’ll take care of the arrangements there. Get me the squadron commander. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>And,” she looked back toward the television monitor for a moment, “get that drone over Chiswell street.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The image on the camera shifted. A voice spoke to her, in Russian. A woman’s voice. “This is </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>3 Squadron Commander, 899.” </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>899</span>
  </em>
  <sup>
    <em>
      <span>th</span>
    </em>
  </sup>
  <em>
    <span> Guards Attack Aviation Regiment. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>“I want you to attack Chiswell Street. East-West aligned, grid square 1044. 1044, do you read, over?”</p><p>“1044, General. Confirmed.”</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix drew her wand. The carrier wave spell, it was the most fundamental to her radio magic, it was the most important in this moment. She felt, from the radio broadcast tower out to the squadron of Rooks which was now approaching the northern part of the City of London and searching through the ground below based on the grid squares into which the city was divided, looking for a target they had nothing in particular to recognise, except for a disembodied voice on the radio, Bellatrix.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>But she looked at the monitor, the television, a muggle far-seeing eye, held by a robotic plane above the ground. She could see where the strike needed to be, and so she guided it in herself, quickly referencing coordinates on the grid against the cardinal directions, eyes sharply monitoring the indicator on the screen of the compass points relative to the image. And working her spell as she did.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then she snapped her wand down, felt the magic course through and sparkling, crackling in her blood, travel out through a connection on the air, through wire leads and into metal antennae and out to the attack aeroplane that was flying over London at that moment, the Su-25 “Rook” that was ‘Rolling Hot’, approaching the target. The horde from that particular cemetery was descending down toward the City, filled with the tens and tens of thousands who came to work there each day, including the Ministry and Diagon, since all the Wizarding areas of London dated to the era when London </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>was </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>the City. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>And she subtly altered that muggle alchemical mixture, the plasticised explosives in the bomb, the mixture of dozens of harmful chemicals, the very things that she had hated about the muggles, awful but necessary to fight a war, and making war all the more awful for it. No nukes here, but ‘</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Energetics’--things with acronyms like RDX, HMX, NG, TNT, and designations like 2,4-DNT. Make the bomb better, make it more efficient, make it safer to handle, make it so it only goes off when you want it to, not even when it’s soaked in a pool of burning fuel from the wreckage of the aeroplane it was carried on, make it so that it’s safe even when the woman you’re talking to, the pilot, is very dead. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>But it still kills on demand, and better than ever before.</p><p>Witches did the same thing, they experimented, they made their potions better, stronger. Spells, curses, hexes more sophisticated. Musicians in the glorious, wild days she grew up in did the same thing too, racing to outdo each other with the skill and cleverness of their guitars and mixes.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She couldn’t help it, as the last part of the spell snapped down the carrier waves and </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>very subtly </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>changed part of the TNT. It was an explosive, after all, it didn’t require much effort. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>The simplest, the easiest one for her magic to influence, not like the tangles of synthetic chemical chains that made up RDX or HMX – “Her Majesty’s eXplosive”. The Russians called it </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>by its chemical name: </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Oktogen.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bella couldn’t resist. She had to quote the song. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>“I am the God of Hellfire, and I bring you Fire!” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The squadron was lined up over Chiswell Street—they pickled their bombs, they fired their rockets. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>“Three squadron commander, be warned that your weapons are now incendiaries.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<em><span>What!?” </span></em><span><span>There was a curse, even to a General—but the warning repeated, staccato, to the other pilots. But, in fact, none of them went more cautiously because of the risk. They were Rook drivers. This was part of the job. </span></span></p><p>They flew their machines straight through the rising balls of flame. Paint singed, turbofans surging, cooling oil throwing alarms, Bellatrix knew enough about muggle technology, she could see the pass on the video screen from the UAV, she could imagine all of what was going on for them.</p><p>They flew on, the street erupted behind and in front and around them in flame. Turned into a wall, a column of flame to drive the inferi back, to destroy all of them that were close enough to face it. The shock of the explosives, shattering the glass on buildings, tearing up the street, but more importantly, detonation turned to deflagration.</p><p>“<span><span>I never thought I’d actually hear someone quote the </span></span><em><span>‘Crazy World of Arthur Brown’ </span></em><span><span>while calling in an airstrike,” someone muttered. Bella ignored him, laughing softly to herself. She hadn’t been there, it was too dangerous, anyway, but she hadn’t needed to be present with her wand to block the move of her former Master. She had blended magic and technology together, and done it remotely.</span></span></p><p>Bellatrix holstered her wand and picked up her cup of tea. “Dispatch fire brigades from the city centre toward Chiswell street. They are not to fight the fire—it’s keeping people safe—they are to pull down buildings to make sure the fire spreads north toward Bunhill fields and away from the city, am I clear?”</p><p>Narcissa stepped back into the post, briskly, confident. Bellatrix could immediately tell from her stride and countenance that her sister was feeling better about the situation. “The Goblins are mobilising. They’re adjusting their weapons to deal with the Inferi.”</p><p>“They can be adjusted?”</p><p>“<span><span>Apparently changing the strength of the spring on the hammer of a Goblin musket will change the spell it produces,” Narcissa explained. “The QRF is landing now, by the way, and the better for it, because they’re approaching </span></span><em><span>us </span></em><span><span>now and there are a lot of them. These horrors always move faster than people expect.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>They do.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>We’ve probably saved the City, and the Ministry </span></span><span><span>and Diagon</span></span><span><span>, but we need to disrupt this spell, Bella. It’s all well and good to </span></span><span><span>fight them block for block with fire, but Voldemort will have still won if we destroy London for him to save it.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Agreed.” Andy nodded once. “Though that was </span></span><em><span>very </span></em><span><span>impressive and doubtless saved thousands of lives, Bella. Always better, right?” </span></span></p><p>“Oh, always.” Bellatrix was tempted to say that it was just buildings, that actually, she could upset Voldemort perfectly well by using fire to guarantee that the vast majority of the population of London was safely evacuated, an evacuation she had just initiated and that was being executed with alacrity by countless thousands of brave law enforcement, military and transportation personnel around the city. Voldemort didn’t just want to blow up buildings, he wanted muggles to <em>die, </em>especially if it was in a way that discredited and hurt his real enemies—which were now clearly the House of Black, <em>thank you very much.</em></p><p>Goblins could rebuild buildings just as well as they could fix railway track, couldn’t they?</p><p>“Bella, any ideas?” Andy prompted again. “We <em>need </em>to disrupt what <em>He’s </em>doing to the city.”</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>closed her eyes and gave it a moment’s thought. “He’s not projecting his magic on carrier waves like I did. He never bothered to learn anything to do with the muggle world like that—as if radio wasn’t natural! Produced by the Cosmos! But, anyway.” A gleam on her face. “Come on, let’s get Hermione, she’ll be good at this, she teased out the location of so many of his stupid horcruxes. He’s got something enchanted, somewhere in the city, that </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>he’s using to project his magic. That’s the only way, Andy.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>H</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>ermione’s first warning had been when one of the Elves requested she come quickly to the Gate House. She had tossed on her uniform jacket and cap, tossed a utility belt on and fastened it, shoved her feet into her combat boots, and sprinted over within a minute, her wand ready and accepting she’d look slightly ridiculous with all of that on over the relaxed summer dress she’d been wearing while watching Delphini. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>It was Ginny, herding a dozen children, with a terrified, pale expression on her face. Hermione stopped short. “Ginny? Kids? Here?”</p><p>“<span><span>Well, Ancient House is so warded, it’s so big, there’s elves to take care of them, </span></span><span><span>it’ll be safe, there’s more coming, but I’ve got to go back, there’s more coming…”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Ginny, </span></span><em><span>what’s happening?” </span></em></p><p>“Inferi,” she stopped, looked sharply at Hermione, her eyes almost shockingly dead, a hollow reminder of when she had been possessed by Tom Riddle’s diary, almost. “Inferi. Hundreds of thousands of them. It’s Voldemort. He did something to raise the dead in London. He’s sabotaged the city. Bellatrix, she was on the radio, magical and normal. Telling everyone to evacuate children, then find a unit and attach ourselves… Ordering people to firmly barricade themselves in their homes, to buy time for the security forces.”</p><p>Hermione closed her eyes, but only for a single moment. “Mardy,” she said to the House Elf. “Get these children into Ancient House, tell them they are guests of young Lady Delphini, and treat them like it.”</p><p>Bellatrix had instructed the elves to take orders from her like a member of the family, even though they weren’t married yet. It was a little uncomfortable for Hermione, but now they came in handy. “Get them comfortable, and keep taking more until ancient house is full, up to the limits of those you think you can care for, understood?”</p><p>“Mardy is understanding, Mistress Hermione.” The elf was calm, and even subdued. Everyone realised how black a day this had to be.</p><p>“<span>Thank you. Ginny, I’ll be following you in a minute. Go for more.”</span></p><p>“Alright,” Ginny nodded breathlessly and turned. Hermione at once apparated to her room—seconds, it was a time when seconds counted. She secured everything that mattered. Rifle, pistol, belt of grenades, vest, harness, combat fatigues, even a backup wand that after some prodding she had selected from the wand store-room in Ancient House. It had once been wielded by some ancient witch of the House of Black, and Bellatrix had just let her have it. In a battle like this, a blood day, a day of horrors, even a wand uneasy in one’s hand was better than being unarmed entirely.</p><p>
  <span>Sixty seconds on the mark to finish dressing. </span>
  <span>One sickening lurch of apparation later and she was at the Gatehouse, and charged through the Floo with only a moment’s pause to make sure it was clear. She nearly collided with two children being herded forward, another dozen behind, by Ginny and another woman she didn’t recognise. “Aie!”</span>
</p><p>“Hermione!” Ginny called. “They’re almost to the entrance to Diagon Alley. Is it possible to ward it?”</p><p>The muggleborn witch angrily pulled back at some defiant hairs which refused to stay under her cap. It was not the time to have her vision blocked with her own air—she’d let it grow out too long during her vacation at Ancient House, clearly. “Not enough time, but the normal enchantments for Inferi discourage them from advancing toward fire so I’ll make a perpetual flame at the entrance, since that’s the only way in to Diagon Alley from the muggle world, it should hold them off.”</p><p>“Good thinking! I’ll be there to cover you in just a minute!”</p><p>
  <span>Hermione gave a single nod and dashed for the pub. The view of Diagon Alley, after years under Voldemort’s reign and a few months of clean-up, seemed like a funhouse mirror. </span>
  <span>It had been a place of joy and wonder, where she had come to get her first magical books at the age of 11 with her parents, allowed in only because their daughter was magical. It had been a place of terror, too. </span>
  <span>He remembered seeing it from above, on the lurching back of a Ukrainian Ironbelly. Now, it looked somewhat like it had been halfway converted into some Dark Sorcerer’s fantasy village; but, the places for Voldemort’s slogans and statues had been replaced by new slogans in support of Narcissa’s government and the Russo-British Alliance.</span>
</p><p>It might all be gone in seconds if she didn’t act. Without another uncomfortable look, she dashed through into broader London, gripped in death and violence and dark magic.</p><p>Death and violence and dark magic, but not fear. In all the zombie movies she’d ever watched, people ran in terror. The police and security forces were terrified, too. It was chaos, utter ruin, the collapse of civilisation.</p><p>Instead, Hermione saw a few police, armed only with batons, herding people into the pub toward the entrance to Diagon alley. “Another one of the Witches said it was safe there, is it, Comrade Colonel?” The leader of the detail asked quickly.</p><p>“Yes,” she acknowledged, for a moment too bemused by the naive English assumption of a hokey Soviet-ism. “Get them in now, but I’ll have to seal it soon.”</p><p>“They’re about two blocks down,” he said matter of factly, and then hastened on with the group of civilians, while Hermione ran in the other direction, toward danger.</p><p>She charged out into the street. She could see the Inferi swarming toward her. People in the street running as hard as they could. A line of armed police who probably didn’t know their guns would be useless. But few screams. Little panic. Determined barring of doors, determined motion toward Tube stations, toward places of shelter. Magic had been open in the world for six years now. There was not the kind of shock of the zombie apocalypse. Fear, horror, anger at the desecration.</p><p>But also people looking to her in confidence and relief when she stepped out into the street, pulling out her wand. There in the uniform of their ally—Russia. Of a Witch of MinKol. A wizard, who could turn back the evil, and hold the line.</p><p>The Inferi came closer and closer in a boiling, horrid, putrid surging mass. She could feel the power in the air, the power of Voldemort’s curse. But she remembered back to the last time she had stood in a street like this, facing overwhelming odds.</p><p>The night before had been the first night she’d fucked Bellatrix.</p><p>The situation was very different, but the solution was the same. No holding the door here, no just closing off and saving Diagon Alley. It was time to take back the streets.</p><p>“What are you waiting for, Hermione?!”</p><p>“Nothing!” Ginny was absolutely right. Time to act.</p><p>“<em>Fiendfyre</em>!”</p><p>“<em>Fiendfyre!</em>”</p><p>It didn’t matter which of the two of them said it first. The intersecting, living columns of fire tore down the street, ripping through the horde before them and turning it at once into a vast funeral pyre.</p><p>“Fuck you, Voldemort.”</p><p> </p><p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Outside of One Canada Square, the helicopters were landing one after another. They barely even touched down, with police and soldiers directing them in. The men in British Army and Police uniforms, signals in hand, marked the spots. The moment the Russian helicopters touched down, their blades still screaming in the air above, the airborne assault troops inside swung out, hopping down from the skids, swinging broken down heavy machine-guns and mortars like they were children’s toys.</p><p>They dashed clear of the blades, and outside, a VDV Major was standing, cigarette dangled between his lips, barrel-chested, aquamarine beret defiantly worn at a jaunty tilt instead of a helmet, dark sunglasses against the summer sun. Waving his hand furiously, he barked orders, personally directing traffic as it were, sending units out to positions along the wharves, pointing, ordering with a voice that somehow carried perfectly through the continuous howl of the engines.</p><p>The moment they were clear, groups of Metropolitan Police hastened forward, escorting civilians, especially the elderly and infirm, to the helicopters. The scream of the Russian turbofans roaring continuously over them, the wind pounding into them, they helped load civilian after civilian into the now empty helicopters, until full up, the pilot made a chopping motion across his neck, and they hastily retreated from the danger zone of the blades, the pilot at once thrusting the throttles forward, the turbofans reaching a screaming fever’s pitch, the machine pulling into the thick June air of London once more. There was not a second wasted.</p><p>Bellatrix jogged out with her sisters to get a better vantage point. They did not after to go far, to see the massive horde of Inferi coming for them. The Russians were setting up at the natural choke points in the wharves between the interlocking old docks, left in place as water features for what was to be London’s new grand commercial development. The bridges and the connections between dry land and buildings—these were the targets of the Engineering Companies, the sappers who were already rushing forward to set charges on the bridges, even as a surging sea of thousands of civilians crossed them.</p><p>“This way now, stay on this side, mind those Russian soldiers, they need to get where they’re going, lass!” One officer was calling out, moving at a walking pace toward safety, while the civilians ran, using his baton gently more as a pointer than anything else, to keep the flow moving in the right direction and a path clear for the Russian sappers to go forward and continue setting their charges.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>While they did, the troops of the QRF got into position, they threw down their machine-guns on the tripods, assembling them within seconds, and linking in the heavy long belts of tracer and incendiary ammunition—the only things which would let them stand a chance against the horde of Inferi. The mortar-teams set up within a minute, behind them, finding cover in the plazas of concrete and stone as best as they could, and selecting their ammunition in the same way. Several daring scouts and officers were dashing ahead with the sappers, beyond the bridges, to set range sticks, and then retreating as the Inferi, moving with that surprising speed, quickly came near. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Your Grace, you should retreat…” One of the officers in the Protection Detail came out, clearly concerned at how close they were to this horrible horde. Now, now, some men were sick, for they could make out what was happening to those unfortunates who had been unable to run fast enough. “You can apparate clear, to safety. Go to Chequers and assume control of the government there. We need leadership to defeat this, Your Grace.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I am, until a replacement is elected or His Majesty returns, also the Regent, and commander, and I must fight,” Narcissa answered. “I’m a perfectly skilled witch.” In these tight quarters, in a situation that was not quite desperate, she was thinking of something less than the absolute desperation of unleashing Fiendfyre on them. “So, thank you, but no. I’m going to stay and fight.” She glanced to Bellatrix, then back to the Colonel. “We’re going to halt them, and once we halt them, we </span></span><em><span>will </span></em><span><span>go to the Ministry of Magic, which will be warded against this. We have to halt Voldemort’s control over the dead in the city, immediately, or London will be ruined in the fighting. I want all of us to try and bring together intersecting </span></span><em><span>Maxima Bombarda Incendiarius,” </span></em><span><span>she instructed to Bellatrix and Andromeda alike. “We’re the Black sisters, we should be able to weave those spells together.”</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix got a wicked grin on her face. “Right as you say, guv’nur.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Don’t you ever even dare to fake a lower-class accent again, Bella, you’re pathetic at it,” Andy shook her head, her own wand ready. “Ready, Cissy.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Then as one…</span></span><em><span>” </span></em><span><span>Three sisters turned toward their foe…</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>And unleashed an explosive hellfire, on an enemy worse than Hell. </span>
  </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0078"><h2>78. No Time To Spare.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>The fire was awful. The smell that blanketed the city was so bad that Hermione and Ginny charmed the air around them. Putrid clouds of black smoke wafted over London. They saw soldiers voluntarily donning their CBRN gear without orders, just to try and escape the stench of burning flesh.</p><p>Of course, there were those who had smelled this awful thing many times before. Hermione would never forget it, she could never forget it. But it was a part of her life. Her senses had been completely deadened to the experience. Against the noonday sun, she put on her sunglasses. She reached into a pocket, she took out an emergency ration bar; unwrapped it, and started slowly eating. The act settled her stomach, calmed her nerves, and it was a last ditch effort to avoid going over to the Metropolitan Police officer who was chain smoking one cigarette every two minutes with methodical precision as he tried to keep order—and asking him for one. As he tried to calm down from what he had just seen, he was occasionally glancing over toward Hermione and Ginny.</p><p>Hermione wanted to go talk to him, but she was too emotionally exhausted by the sudden rush of combat, the horror, the desperation, the use of magical energy, the adrenaline rush of victory, the dull awareness of the deadening of her senses. “Want some, Ginny?”</p><p>“No. Thank you.” Ginny wasn’t quite there yet. She paused, and tried to think of something constructive to say. “Do we just stay here? Hold Diagon Alley ‘At All Costs’?”</p><p>Behind them, more civilians were being evacuated into it, the first sight that Muggles would have it. <em>Ruined by Voldemort. Well, soiled, anyway. </em>Hermione popped another bit of chocolate-fruit-energy bar into her mouth and watched the guttering flames in the buildings she had just burned down. She didn’t want to think about how many people might have died as collateral damage, well aware and having fully accepted it was many, many less than the Inferi had been about to tear apart.</p><p>“Absent other orders, yes.”</p><p>“What about… Everyone else?”</p><p>Hermione looked up, met Ginny’s eyes, tried to be reassuring. “They’ll do what we just did, if they have to, to stay alive.” There was smoke rising from plenty of places in the city, they weren’t the first group of wizards and they weren’t the last, either. Nobody out in London that day was going down without a fight.</p><p>Not to that.</p><p>Hermione was worried though. She’d have to be insane not to be. <em>But how can Bellatrix get in touch with me? </em></p><p>Well, there was a way for Hermione to get in touch with <em>Bellatrix. </em>“Just to be sure we’re not needed elsewhere,” Hermione remarked to Ginny, “I’ll let them know where we are.”</p><p>“Okay!”</p><p>“<em>Expecto Patronus.</em>” This, Bellatrix could not do. This, the legacy of her time as a Death Eater, for no Death Eater could cast this spell. Hermione conjured forth, strong and vivid and bright, her Otter—her mind firmly focused on her and Bellatrix, together, in the baths of Ancient House. She had plenty of happy memories with which to call it forth, even if they had all changed with time in this terrible war.</p><p>The Otter pranced, and the effect on muggles was spectacular. People perked up. There were voices of encouragement to each other, and one group of armed police hastening down a side street a block up let out a cheer before they carried on their way.</p><p>“Carry a message to Bellatrix Black!” She sent her Patronus on the way, to speak with her voice, to say: ‘<em>Bellatrix, we’re guarding the entrance to Diagon Alley. We defeated the Inferi coming this way. Is there anything else you want us to do?</em>’</p><p>Then she waited, pacing with Ginny, her eyes on stalks, looking for any side of the Inferi returning. There was none, and instead she saw, to her relief, a column of BTRs coming up the street. They swung to a stop, and the dismount troops included two MinKol wizards, and six teams with RPO ‘Rys’ or Lynx rocket-propelled flamethrowers. <em>Good, good… </em></p><p>That made their ability to hold their position at all costs – much more plausible.</p><p>“<span><span>Councillor Granger?” One of the wizards jogged up, and saluted. “Junior Councillor Sergei Dorokhin, Councillor. We were diverted to hold this position.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Let me help you lay out your defences, and I’ll show you where the entrance to Diagon Alley—the hidden wizarding community—is,” Hermione explained, quickly going through it. She barely got to the end, when her Otter returned with a Raven swooping overhead. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>For a moment, she nearly had a heart attack, stunned at the idea that with no training, after almost </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>her entire adult life as a Death Eater, had just cast a Patronus. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Hermione, it’s Andromeda,” the Raven said, perching on a bar-stool. </span></span></p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Oh. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione then realised that she had never seen Andromeda’s Patronus before—she had never really been around the Order, in those situations where one might need a Patronus. She had </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>helped </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>the Order. She had been accounted a member, but she hadn’t fought. And yet, since their flight from Britain, well, she remembered the very confident and very skilled Andromeda Black Tonks who had stood on the dock in the Netherlands, and helped save them all, and then…</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>London. Here we are. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>“Is everyone…”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes, we’re fine,” Andromeda answered. “But we need you, quickly. We need your help. We believe Voldemort’s power is influencing London through an enchanted artefact, and we want your advice. If we don’t destroy it soon, we’ll lose the city.”</span></span></p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Oh. Another one of those hunts. But in minutes, not days. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione’s gut clenched. But she nodded. “Of course, Andromeda. A detachment just arrived to cover Diagon…”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Yes, we sent them.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Then we’ll apparate straight away. How will I find you?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>One Canada Place, you know?” </span></span></p><p>
  <em>
    <span>If you can’t apparate to the largest Skyscraper in the United Kingdom, you’re a pretty hopeless muggleborn, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione thought to herself with a grin, and despite the anxiety, nodded again. “Going now!” The Patroni faded away. “Councillor Dorokhin, I think I’ve covered enough.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I saw, you don’t need to explain, just go,” he answered. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>They exchanged a salute and Hermione dashed off to find Ginny. They were going to do this now, or there would be no reason to do it at all. London would be </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>gone </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>to save the people within her if they did not act </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>now. Do in minutes what you used to do in days.</span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Bellatrix watched a platoon of her British soldiers coming up smartly, having crossed the Thames by boat to the pier at Westferry circus. They were lugging along four L7A2 machine guns that they quickly set up on the flank of the defensive position, and began fitting the continuous belts. Their arrival was into the teeth of the surging mass of Inferi, but the moment they arrived and settled in, they opened up with the four machine-guns on full automatic, even as part of that mass of the undead, under the nefarious power that animated them, turned toward the living.</p><p>The belts were mixed incendiary and tracer and for a moment that sea of the dead simply <em>stopped </em>as the four machine-guns tore into them at rapid fire, the loaders linking belt after belt—firing at a rate to where they would quickly overheat the guns. There were pails of water for that. The riflemen in the platoon had under-rifle grenade launchers, and these they began firing, with white phosphorous marking grenades.</p><p>Spinning, Bellatrix spared a moment to help them. Another <em>Bombarda Maxima Incendiarus </em>leapt from her wand, mingling the motions and weaving the complex incantations together. It was just as good as a fuel air bomb, or better. A concussive blast followed by a flash of fire all around, after a moment’s pause. A block’s worth of the dead vanished in flames from the streets, around buildings already burning.</p><p>Her sisters were just as busy. She had barely noticed Andromeda peel off to send away her Patronus, and promptly the middle Black Sister was back into the fray. This was a master-class in Defence. Though she was not as <em>experienced </em>as Bellatrix or even Narcissa, Andromeda might just be the most <em>talented </em>of the three. Even Bella had to admit it.</p><p>She chose her targets and executed her attacks with a careful economy of force, maximising the damage to the Inferi and minimising the damage to the surrounding environment. Bella was too busy with her own attacks to even pay half as much attention to this as she had wanted to, but there they were, fighting together, and Andy was an amazing sight for anyone who had the slightest chance to actually take the time and <em>watch her. </em></p><p>And then a sharp series of flame attacks and carefully projected shields to contain the Inferi and drive them back into the fire neatly boxed the targets in front of her, and Bella finished them in a moment. Andy took advantage of the sudden lapse in the pressure against their position, and through the chattering of the guns, the booming of mortars and shells and the scream of rockets—the flash of their spells all around—she turned and pocketed a huge number of them in two intersecting lines of living fire, never once losing control of it to consume nearby buildings, even as any other Witch might have lost control of the Fiendfyre.</p><p>Hermione and Ginny. <em>They have come. </em></p><p>The sounds of battle faded. The Inferi advancing on Canary Wharf had essentially been completely extirpated. It was a moment of perfect relief for all involved, save perhaps the Black Sisters and the witches they had summoned, who all knew that it was not over by a longshot. But, to the troops there, they had defeated the hideous attack. It might come again, but that time was later, it wasn’t now. They would live long enough for another cigarette, a cup of tea, a ration amidst the stench if they had the stomach for it—maybe they would still be dead in an hour, but for the moment, they were there, they had won <em>that </em>time, there were simple pleasures and comrades close by. It might as well be heaven, the particular kind of heaven you know when you live in Hell.</p><p>Wafting smoke and the stench of burnt flesh. All the witches and the muggles too had seen Andy’s performance. So had most of the wizards and witches from MinKol positioned there, the new Black Guard corps as well. They didn’t hold it against her when she staggered down to her knees and threw up, profusely.</p><p>Bellatrix stepped to her sister’s side, and embraced <em>her, </em>rather than Hermione. She could tell, from the corner of her eye, that Hermione had no problem with it. “It’s not easy. Not this awful, miserable stench. Gods, Andy, you would have been such an asset to the Order. You’re a better duellist than I. I saw the sparks when we were young, but you kept at it. But you never fought.”</p><p>“I never fought because of you and Narcissa, Bella,” she answered, between heaves that still wracked her body, looking out over the oily smoke and black soot of a battlefield where they had faced the dead. Her small body heaved with laughter, then, too, some paroxysm of so many complicated feelings, emotions and compulsions all at once. “Damnit, Bella, don’t you see what you did? I <em>couldn’t </em>fight. I couldn’t show this to anyone. How could I fight for the light when it meant fighting against you and Cissy? That I might literally face you on the other end of my wand, someday? Don’t you see? I couldn’t fathom that. Everyone accepted the notion that I was a weak house-witch, that I supported the Order in other ways, from home. But I made that choice, because while I believed in the light and I married Ted—fuck, Bella, I’d rather be thought weak than face my own flesh and blood in battle.”</p><p>Bellatrix started crying. Even Narcissa, trying to look utterly composed, rigidly calm for the sake of the troops, turned quickly away to speak with Hermione. She heard snippets.</p><p>“We must find the means of Voldemort’s control over the dead. Soon. Or the city is lost.”</p><p>“I understand, Your Grace,” Hermione answered, like a shield of rigid formality.</p><p>Bellatrix helped Andy to her feet. “Come on, sister-mine,” she murmured, wiping her own eyes. “The best of us.”</p><p>“I don’t want to play that game. No best. I’m just so thankful we’re all together,” she replied, letting Bella lead up to the others.</p><p>“So,” Hermione was speaking, “We need someone who can give us <em>some idea </em>of where to start.” A grimace. “As much as I hate to admit it, Your Grace, perhaps it was a mistake to execute the attaindered prisoners so soon. We need intelligence.”</p><p>“It can be quite hard to get intelligence out of prisoners, especially Death Eaters,” Narcissa answered coolly. “However, you are right. We need something—anything. Fortunately, there might be one prisoner, still very much alive, who can help us.”</p><p>“Oh?” Hermione asked, and Bellatrix took the chance to step closer to her, brush her hand across Hermione’s shoulder, smile at her.</p><p>Hermione smiled back, a flash of a smile out of the corner of her eye, while staying focused on Narcissa. It was good enough, it would have to be good enough for the circumstances.</p><p>“Yes,” Narcissa nodded. “We’ll need to make haste for the Ministry holding cells, then. The classmate of Draco and your’s…. Theodore Nott. He was captured when we took the Isle of Portland. But I have hesitated in attaindering him, because of his father’s appeal. I felt it had some truth in it, that he was more at fault.”</p><p>
  <em>And perhaps you can’t quite bring yourself to start chopping off the heads of your little Dragon’s classmates? </em>
  <span>Bellatrix mused, watching the interplay between the two, watching Hermione’s expression harden for a moment, and then soften. </span>
</p><p>“<span>He didn’t join Voldemort’s forces at the Battle of Hogwarts. And he was never as cruel to Harry as the others. Perhaps there </span><em>is </em><span>something that can be saved in him, if he realises how awful this current situation is, and how entirely it is Voldemort’s responsibility, and </span><em>design, </em><span>to bring the living dead against the city,” Hermione acknowledged in a speech that showed her own smooth maturity. Even in the forces, even in this rough life, a bit of the air of a politician was still around Hermione. She was a very well-matched pair with Narcissa. </span></p><p>
  <em>Hah, you fell in love with a woman a little bit like your sister. Pervert, </em>
  <span>Bella mocked herself idly. </span>
</p><p>“<span>Then it’s settled. We’ll go to the holding cells at the Ministry, first.” </span></p><p>“<span>Oh lovely place.” </span></p><p>
  <span>Narcissa shot her sister an unamused look. “Best not to mention you’ve been in them, Bella. Let’s go.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They all raised their wands together, the better to avoid any effects of sidealong. Bellatrix had already transferred operational command of the troops at Canary Wharf when she had moved to fight personally, too important, too needed with her wand to stay near the headquarters post. Now there was nothing stopping them. </span>
</p><p>“<span>Diagon Alley first, then the floo to the Ministry, to get past the shields!” And with that, a snap brought them to the ruins of the street where only minutes before, Hermione and Ginny had defended their own position. </span></p><p>
  <span>No new number of Inferi had arrived subsequently, not enough time had passed or there were no more approaching in the area, and they passed quickly through to Diagon, and found their way to a working Floo. Fortunately, most of the children and civilians, muggles and wizards alike in the immediate vicinity of the entrance to the magical pocket-space, had already been evacuated and they could move quickly on into the massive arrival hall of the Ministry, too well warded to come under immediate attack. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>From Inferi. </span>
</p><p>The dead people in the entry hall had not been killed by Inferi. Bellatrix snapped a shield up when she saw the bodies on the floor, without even really thinking. It was sufficient to cover the first spells that went their way, and then she was dashing forward, taking cover behind a potted plant and lancing a <em>sectumsempra </em>right back. Narcissa fell in at her side. Hermione and Andy had gone right with Ginny, and they pushed on forward from the bank of fireplaces deeper into the ministry.</p><p>“Fuck it,” Bellatrix shrieked out, and hurtled a <em>Bombarda </em>next, taking down a part of a balcony with a rewarding scream. “He must have ordered a counterattack by the wizarding forces in the Isle of Wight, maybe even reinforced them.”</p><p>“I’d heard from a report before we got drawn into the front-line fighting that they were counterattacking across the Solent, they’d pushed back the sea with magic,” Narcissa answered, her own wand flicking quickly with another spell. “But I’d taken it for a diversion.”</p><p>“It probably still is, but to cover infiltrating these fucks back into London. Well, come on, Cissy, we won’t keep your Kingdom if we don’t lay ‘em about.” She caught Andy’s attention, flashed a wink her way, and then lunged forward again.</p><p>Her middle sister and Cissy covered her smartly, and then Hermione and Ginny were up at her side, as they used lightening spells to leap up to a higher level of the Atrium. A flurry of wand-work quickly had the two men they were facing, in the uniforms of Morsmordre Aurors, pushed on their back-heel.</p><p>And then Bellatrix smirkingly lined one up, about to take him with an <em>Avada Kedavra </em>when she remembered the lament about being unable to interrogate prisoners. <em>There’s always an alternative to interrogations. </em>She nailed him—in the middle of combat no less—with the <em>Imperious </em>curse, instead. And her first command was simple, a pointed gesture, and a half-shriek of “kill him!”</p><p>Hermione, even having just watched Bellatrix force a man under the Imperious Curse to kill his comrade, showed no expression, and Bella realised just how much the fight with the undead must have driven home how dire the situation was for her. She’d almost gotten used to the back and forth of their debates over morality and ethics in war over the past year and a half, and now … Now, a cool, collected Hermione thought nothing of it as they pressed together, and then all together, the five witches met four racing Morsmordre Aurors who were responding to the breach of the perimeter, the annihilation of their rear-guard.</p><p>Andy shielded the rest, taking the spells of four Aurors at once while leaving the others free to attack. It took only a minute as they split into two groups, Cissy and Bella to the left and Hermione and Ginny to the right, and blasted through the opposition. They might have held on for a few minutes more, but there was a shout from behind them. <em>British </em>Aurors, Narcissa’s new loyalists to the government. The Morsmordre, then, had not <em>captured </em>the Ministry, not yet, and caught in a pincer, they made short work of the men they were facing.</p><p>Narcissa wasted no time at all. “Have they reached the holding cells?” She asked sharply.</p><p>“No, Your Grace.” One of the Aurors saluted with his wand quickly and turned to the side. “Do you think that’s where they’re headed?”</p><p>“Actually no, I don’t have a clue about that, but if they’re not there yet, they probably weren’t aiming to rescue prisoners, which means wherever they are at the moment may be more important to them.”</p><p>Bellatrix wondered if perhaps even the raising of the Inferi was a diversion, if Voldemort was trying to get something back that had been stored in the Ministry. <em>Probably not, per se, but he would happily use the attack by the Inferi as both, to punish London for defying him, and to cover something else. </em>The other possibility was that whatever gave him his power over the City was actually in the Ministry Building and the Wizards were here to protect it, but Bellatrix thought that would be a very sloppy possibility if true, for it would just unnecessarily draw attention to its location.</p><p>Hermione seemed to think much the same: “Your Grace, he has a high value target here. Maybe we should split up.”</p><p>Bellatrix grimaced. “I had a bad feeling about the three of us parting for today, Hermione. Those bad feelings aren’t the kind of thing that you should ignore.”</p><p>Hermione smiled tightly to her. “Then Ginny and I will go with the Aurors, join in the counterattack. The three of you can try to talk some sense into Nott the Younger. No bad feeling about that, is there?”</p><p>“Just the one about being apart from you,” Bellatrix heard herself say, nevermind the embarrassment or being so blatantly open about their relationship in front of the team of British Aurors.</p><p>But Hermione didn’t seem to care. She just smiled. “The sooner it’s done with, the sooner we’re back together. And if you need to find me, use the scar.”</p><p>Bellatrix stared, refusing to believe the permission she had just been given. Then Andy tugged on her shoulder.</p><p>“Come on, Bella. We’ve got to go, we can’t waste a second.”</p><p>“I love you, Hermione.”</p><p>“And that’s why I just gave you permission, Bella,” she answered, and spun away with Ginny, boots falling on the marble floors, moving fast and moving hard, wand out and ready and keen, uniformed, armed, falling in with the team, assuming a natural leadership position as a Colonel.</p><p>Bellatrix spared one last glance, and took off at a dead run with her sisters, down toward the holding cells, where twenty years before, she had made love to Alecto Carrow, and waited for the Hell of Azkaban.</p><p>Somehow, it didn’t darken her anymore. Hermione was waiting, if they could just stop the Lord she’d put herself in Hell for. It was time for some revenge.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0079"><h2>79. The Limit of Humanity</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend”, once wrote the British historian Macaulay of Frederick the Great, “black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.”</p><p>Colonel Alexandra Lukachenko—promoted four months before—remembered that line very well, from when she had forced herself through the book as part of her military history studies, the old English, old concepts, old words, straining her knowledge of a foreign language to the limit. But the quote had remained with her, the uncontrollable spiral of war. The imponderable impacts of one action on another.</p><p>After Hermione had left on her terrible tryst with destiny, Alexandra had gotten a few letters, and knew enough to understand that she had survived, and succeeded, and now stood at the side of the defected General Black. She hoped that her friend was well, but something clearly wasn’t.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Her own fate had been to follow General Pronichev in his promotion, receiving her own at the same time. He was assigned to take command of the 25</span>
  </span>
  <sup>
    <span>
      <span>th</span>
    </span>
  </sup>
  <span>
    <span> Army Corps, defending the northern approach to Lake Van as part of the 2</span>
  </span>
  <sup>
    <span>
      <span>nd</span>
    </span>
  </sup>
  <span>
    <span> Transcaucasus Front. Because of the fast-moving and complex environment when directly facing Lord Voldemort, Corps level coordination between Protection Battalions had begun, and she had been assigned to organise it—essentially concentrating MinKol and their assigned protectors into a Corps level Brigade-sized formation of which she was the deputy commander behind Councillor </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Maxim Astakhov, commander of said MinKol forces.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The first inkling of a problem had come when, going to get some tea in the headquarters compound (it was a fortified position of tents behind the lines, the situation in the mountains of eastern Turkey was quite rough), a</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> woman in a VDV uniform </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>she had never seen before had gone urgently to the General and begun to speak. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Once, there wouldn’t have been any women in VDV uniforms, except in the training and support elements—but then, that was before half their cities got nuked and the first two million or so troops had been torn through fighting the Morsmordre. The women and old men started showing up in lots of places then. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>In the regular Army, that was when she had been made commander of a rifle company, after all. As for this woman? Half her face looked like it was burned off, so she must have been in the thick of it for a while. But rather uncomfortably, when she opened her eye, it was intact.</p><p>Awful wound to be disfigured like that, but she still had her eyes, she could still serve. The bad luck to kiss your face with fire, the good luck that you closed your eye, just in time. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away.</p><p>
  <span>Alexandra watched her with the uncomfortable sense that something was definitely up. Then, with a senior sergeant at her side, she quickly left again, heading back to the helicopter pads. </span>
  <span>One of the birds was screaming airborne within a minute</span>
  <span>. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Yes, something is up. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>A moment later, General Pronichev called her over, and gathered the rest of his staff with him. “</span>
  <span>We’ve received orders.” </span>
</p><p><span><span>Alexandra glanced back to see </span></span>Zoë, the Palmyran, arriving. More wizards from Syria had escaped than regular soldiers, and they had agreed to reinforce the Russian MinKol detachments in the Transcaucasus. She had become the second in command for the 25<sup>th</sup> Army Corps’ wizards and essentially Alexandra’s equal in their chain of command. A wordless smile was exchanged with Alexandra, before the woman saluted to General Pronichev.</p><p>“Glad you could make it in time,” he remarked.</p><p>“I apparated in as soon as I got the radio message, Sir.”</p><p>“Unfortunately we have little time,” he acknowledged.</p><p>Alexandra quietly offered a small cup of tea to Zoë, in the Arab style.</p><p>“I’m afraid,” Pronichev continued, “that there has been a serious incident in London, and our forces in the British Isles and the allied British Government are in urgent need of assistance. I will put this plainly with you—that beast over there,” he gestured toward Diyabakir, and everyone knew what he meant, <em>who </em><span>he meant, “has raised the dead of London, and turned them against the living. A major force of wizards is supporting this, but our intelligence personnel and the British agree that he is likely personally controlling this … plague of the undead, of his own volition.”</span></p><p>Even by the standards of this war, several had gone stiff and pale. It was unfathomable to think about the scale of what was being described, no small group of the undead, but a vast host, from the burying grounds of an entire major metropolitan area.</p><p>“<span>We are in a good position with the 25</span><sup><span>th</span></sup><span> to force Voldemort to intervene at the front personally,” Pronichev continued, his own voice taut, features composed. Alexandra could tell he was a man about to say something he did not wish to. “So we are going to try and achieve that. We will be launching a counterattack.”</span></p><p>“<span>Sir!” The Chief of Staff, Stanislav Osminin, a lean and slight man with a sharply made mustache, </span><span>faintly trembled as he stepped forward to the map, marking the positions of the mountains. “We have been pushed back in five months of heavy combat—we have lost thirty percent of our strength in </span><span>men</span><span>, thirty-five percent in tanks and armoured vehicles, twenty percent in artillery. Twenty percent of our wizards, too. We don’t have the ammunition allotments for the rocket artillery to provide support for an offensive operation, either, and the conventional artillery will give us only enough for two days before we exhaust the ready reserve stocks.” </span></p><p>“<span>Stanislav Antonivich, </span><em>I know.</em><span>” </span><em>Pronichev </em><span>crossed himself. She’d never seen that before, in these years of war. “We’re attacking. God help us. There’s ten million people in Greater London, if we can distract that monster, we may help save some of them.” </span></p><p>Stanislav nodded once and leaned over the map, beginning to tick off positions. “Sir, it’s not in my character to plan an attack that’s going to fail.”</p><p>“We will have support. The Colonel I just spoke to said they are sending up a battery of 203’s.”</p><p>“<span>Oh,” Alexandra voiced it quite involuntarily. Pronichev nodded, </span><span>seeing something in her expression that she herself did not recognise.</span></p><p>“<span>Yes, Colonel, </span><span>it’s so</span><span>. </span><span>The NBC Protection Troops will be alerted, and everyone is to be ready with their NBC gear immediately. We’ve been allocated eight tactical nuclear weapons to support the attack. </span><span>Now we do not have days, but hours; officers, we must plan this within minutes, not hours, and then distribute the orders to your units. We will make each life count.</span><span>”</span></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Theodore Nott, long blonde hair, thin, slight, rather frail. One of those rock stars that Bellatrix had listened to back in the free-wheeling 60s. The kind that ended up dead of a drug overdose by 1975, really. But he was a wizard, not a rock star.</p><p>He also handled his imprisonment well, to his credit, though the holding cells at the Ministry were nothing so horrible as Azkaban. Bellatrix glanced to Cissy and Andy, then back through the cell window, past the bars, at Nott. He hadn’t noticed them yet. “Cover me. This is an active combat zone.”</p><p>“You’re…” Narcissa began to speak, then trailed off. “Hmm. Yes.”</p><p>“Exactly.” Bella looked to the Auror on guard. “Unlock the cell.”</p><p>And he did.</p><p>That was an unexpectedly weird feeling of empowerment. Probably she had fantasized about it, putting an Auror under the Imperious curse and just telling them to open the door, but she couldn’t quite remember it. Maybe it was just her imagination.</p><p>Now Theodore looked up, and hissed, rubbing at the stubble on his chin. “Bellatrix.”</p><p>“That’s right.” Bella leaned against the cell door. “Bella, if you prefer.”</p><p>A laugh. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that fits quite right at the moment?”</p><p>“Well, I’ve been in these cells, though it was the next cell-block down,” she said, an easy if frenetic laugh coming to her. “Sorry about your dad.”</p><p>He froze. “Do you have to rub in it?”</p><p>“I don’t think I am—he played the game and lost. I meant that sincerely.” Her voice softened.</p><p>“And are you trying to mock me, before you kill me?”</p><p>“Oh what? Fuck no. I’m here to talk because, well, my friend, your dad was a bit of a bastard but he was better than most, he had real dignity. He tried to talk us out of punishing you, for what he pushed you into. And in fairness I think that’s right. Oh, I chose my course. I don’t think you did.”</p><p>“...You chose your course, but it came out pretty well for you.”</p><p>“<span><span>You have absolutely got to know when to leap, </span></span><span><span>my friend, </span></span><span><span>when you’re on a train speeding toward a wrecked bridge. That’s all it was.” </span></span><span><span>She never called him kid or anything else. She wouldn’t have liked it, when she was young, even if she had been caught here. “Look, as absurd as this sounds, we need your help.”</span></span></p><p>He stiffened, a little.</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix sniffed and shook her head. “London is done. Dying. The dead have risen. You’ll be fine in here, sure, in this holding cell. But people, wizards and muggles alike, are dying by the thousands right now. And joining the ranks of the living dead when they do. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Inferi, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>he’s raised Inferi, hundreds of thousands of them. And he has some way to do it, here in the city.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“Gods, hundreds of thousands of Inferi?” He stared up in blank horror. “How, but, he’ll destroy everything?”</p><p>“Of course he will. He has never failed to punish those who betrayed him. Think of London like a person. It welcomed us back—it betrayed him. So, he’s punishing it with utter destruction. Fuck, you know, I suffered the Cruciatus curse more than a few times for displeasing him. The further in time from his grasp over my mind that I get, the more I am incredulous I ever tolerated. But you don’t think like that, in the grip of his influence. You never think like that, until long after it’s over. I’m lucky enough to be able to reflect on it. Wouldn’t you like the same luck?”</p><p>“<span><span>You’re desperate enough to offer me a pardon? But you just implied I would suffer horribly from the Dark Lord.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>After your father surrendered the city early, do you really think you will get off, in the slightest? He will punish you for your father’s sin. For the sin of surrendering.” She shrugged. “Suit yourself, die. Do you think the Gods of our ancestors will look kindly upon you, for that the graves of our people have been defamed and robbed, the dead are not quietly resting, but have been ripped from the Earth of our island? Don’t be a fucking fool. Yes, we could all lose. But he’s very angry and trying very hard to stop us right now, and we need your help. I need your father’s information, whatever of it you have, on what he might have enchanted t</span></span><span><span>hat’s letting him control a horde of Inferi from such a distance, and I need it now.”</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>T</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>heodore closed his eyes and sighed slowly, and softly. “The Magic is Might Statue. Father said that, actually, it had been enchanted by Lord Voldemort to help him keep order at the Ministry.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Andy stepped forward, then, her eyes flashing with fear. “But, it’s </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>already </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>gone, Bella, Cissy. We should have gone past it on our way in.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Cissy sighed softly, but her eyes gleamed. “The removal is a problem, but fortunately not that much of one; it was removed for disposal as a symbol of the prior regime. But it hasn’t been cut up yet certainly, and considering that it’s in a muggle yard with a bunch of others waiting to be crushed or melted, well, if they tried that with a cursed object… I’ll be able to get the location within minutes, at least, the Home Secretary will have an inventory of where these were taken for destruction.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Well, come along with us, Theodore,” Bellatrix reached out and helped the surprised young man up. “We’re going to surprise him with how quickly we stopped him. I have to admit, I rather like interfering with his plans.” A triumphant sneer crossed her lips for a moment, she couldn’t help it. “</span></span><span><span>We are letting him go, right, Cissy?” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Of course we are. One, it wouldn’t behove me to refuse a promise you already made, and secondly, I’m absolutely sure he’s not lying. It’s so stereotypically – </span></span><em><span>Voldemort.</span></em><span><span>” There was a real sneer of contempt there. “Let’s go.”</span></span></p><p>Together, three witches and one slightly shell-shocked young wizard whose father’s plea had, in the end, given him a chance at life, left the Ministry Holding Cells.</p><p>Bella’s only concern now was finding out what Hermione had been up to in the meantime.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione and Ginny had met up with a group of Aurors and rallied them for the counterattack. They </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>were chasing a group of Morsmordre Aurors led by a single masked Death Eater. Clearly it was an important target, if Voldemort had sent one of his remaining foremost minions. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>F</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>rom bulk and shape, Hermione figured it was a man. There had been new Death Eaters, but… </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Hermione </span></span><em><span>Granger</span></em><span><span>! Hah!” </span></span></p><p>
  <em>Jugson.</em>
</p><p>He turned toward her and Ginny and unleashed a flurry of cutting spells, which drove them back on their shields. Hermione met him blow for blow. She’d killed one Death Eater during the liberation of the British Isles so far, she could handle another.</p><p>
  <span>They were in what had been the Department of Mysteries, because of course they were. Hermione remembered plenty of it, and most of all, the fact that she had the first encounter of her life with Bellatrix here. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Focus. Focus. </span>
  </em>
  <span>She let loose with a </span>
  <em>
    <span>Sectumsempra </span>
  </em>
  <span>bracketed by disarming charms in a sharp economy of motions. Ginny surprised one of them by kicking over a potted plant even as she cast a spell; her physical focus on Quidditch had certainly done her very well in preparing for this day. It tumbled down on one of the men descending deeper into the Department of Mysteries, which, though officially one level, had a very complicated geometry. </span>
</p><p>Then Jugson shouted “Just keep going, I’ll hold them!”</p><p>
  <span>Hermione didn’t think it was out of a sense of respect for his men. She blocked another of his spells, leapt clear of a second. </span>
  <em>
    <span>There’s something so important here that he’d rather die than fail in his mission. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>That led to a second recognition, even as Hermione pressed home a fresh counterattack that drove him back against a wall. Jugson was still a threat to both her and Ginny, but she felt she was getting the upper hand. </span>
  <em>
    <span>He’s scared. Scared of failing. It would be worse than dying. Use that.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>“<span>I’m just here to handle the </span><em><span>liquidation, </span></em><span>Jugson,” she mocked, sending a quick and handy undressing spell that managed to slip through and rip off his silver face-mask. Toppling the ground, she continued her threat: “It’s Bellatrix who’s already put an end to your scheme.” </span></p><p>“<em><span>The traitor!? I –</span></em><span>” He cut himself off and tried to nail Ginny with an </span><em><span>Avada Kedavra </span></em><span>that she barely dodged. </span></p><p>
  <span>A ruthless and unexpected result, but it did provide an opening. Hermione could see the man’s eyes, desperate, wild, distracted. She finally caught him with an </span>
  <em>
    <span>Expellarmius </span>
  </em>
  <span>and then Ginny summoned his wand to her before he could possibly recover. </span>
</p><p>“<span>Pursue them,” Hermione instructed to the group of British Aurors, gesturing to where the Morsmordre Aurors had gone deeper into the Department of Mysteries. “I’ll interrogate the prisoner.”</span></p><p>“Colonel.”</p><p>
  <span>Ginny stepped closer, guarding her, as Hermione walked up to Jugson, laying back against the wall. He’d snapped his head on it rather hard. </span>
</p><p>“Let’s get you talking about what you’re here for.”</p><p>His eyes snapped into lucid focus for a moment. “You don’t know? But, the traitor…!”</p><p>Before he could finish the thought, his voice dissolved into a scream, right after Hermione shifted her wand. “<em>Crucio.</em>”</p><p>“...Oh God Hermione did you just <em>use the Cruciatus Curse on him?” </em>Ginny blanched.</p><p>“<em><span>Crucio.</span></em><span><span>” Hermione said again, the screams redoubling as Jugson curled and twitched like a man being electrocuted. She was not screaming. She was not red or flush with anger, this was far worse. To use the Cruciatus curse, you had to </span></span><em><span>mean it, </span></em><span><span>from the depths of your heart. Her face was </span></span><em><span>pale </span></em><span><span>with rage, the kind of composed, cool rage which made blood run cold. She knew it, she felt it, like the rage would burst forth any moment, but instead, it had her as cold as ice and ready to </span></span><span><span>do anything. </span></span></p><p>“<em><span>Hermione?” </span></em></p><p>
  <span>She ignored her friend. “</span>
  <em>
    <span>Crucio.</span>
  </em>
  <span>”</span>
</p><p>“<em><span>Oh my God.</span></em><span>”</span></p><p>
  <span>It was then that she struck. When he was in such agony that there was no way for him to respond. “</span>
  <em>
    <span>Imperio.</span>
  </em>
  <span>” She tore into his brain without the slightest bit of resistance. He calmed down. The pain fled. He looked peaceful. </span>
</p><p>“The Imperious curse, too? My God, Hermione…” Ginny looked as white as a sheet.</p><p>“What were you here for?” Hermione addressed Jugson.</p><p>“Oh, oh, you know, Colonel. Orders. The Dark Lord sent me to fetch Harry Potter’s head, that’s all,” he chuckled softly. “What would you have …”</p><p>Ginny froze.</p><p>Hermione slowly nodded, her face still frigid cold, feeling no emotion, like her blood had been replaced by ice-water. “What,” she said, so, so softly, “does the Dark Lord want with Harry Potter’s head?”</p><p>“Need to keep it safe, that’s all he said, retrieve it at all costs… He didn’t tell me anything else, Colonel. You don’t just ask the Dark Lord what his reasons are.”</p><p>“Hermione, I’m …”</p><p>“Worried about me and furious about Harry at the same time?” Hermione shot her friend a look. “Wanted to think I was going to hell, then heard what he was here for, and decided maybe it wasn’t so awful, after all?”</p><p>“<span>Hermione… Yes,” the redhead admitted with a sigh. “Bellatrix, you know, she got me with a </span><em><span>Crucio. </span></em><span>And not that long ago, either. But I shut up and held it in, when she was on our side, for the sake of our future, to have her help, to </span><em><span>win. </span></em><span>Double shut up, when it turned out that Narcissa Malfoy of all people had ended up the </span><em><span>Prime Minister. </span></em><span>But Hermione, I’m worried she’s making you darker, but…”</span></p><p>“I bet you want to Crucio Voldemort pretty fucking hard if you get the chance.”</p><p>Ginny opened her mouth, closed it again.</p><p>There was a commotion by the stairs down. A group of their Aurors were coming back, with a few prisoners, and something else. Both Hermione and Ginny froze, and looked that way, and a blow hit Hermion straight in the gut, as hard as it could.</p><p>Ginny whispered, softly, staring, entranced in horror: “You’re damn right I do.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Without further hesitation, Narcissa had sworn Theodore Nott an oath of wands to his loyalty to the Crown and her Government. Then she had gone to one of the banks of Floos in the Atrium, where fresh detachments of MinKol personnel were arriving to re-secure the Ministry. There, she used one of them to contact Whitehall immediately, and ended up bent over in a hushed and urgent conversation with Priti Patel.</p><p>As Narcissa spoke with the Home Secretary, Bellatrix paced with Andromeda, nervously, eyes flashing as she looked around the Atrium. “I should go look for her,” she started, again.</p><p>Then Andy gently brushed her shoulder and pointed. “No need, Bella.”</p><p>Bella turned and sighed in relief, to see Hermione well, just immediately to stiffen again. The look on her face looked suitable only for a funeral, and the look in her eyes—well, it reminded Bellatrix of a kind with the sorts of looks that she had sometimes. Ginny, next to her, had a firm set of her jaw and was absolutely pale, almost impossibly so even by the standards of redheads. The Aurors, guarding their prisoners, including a ruined, trembling, partially spasmed Jugson, were formed almost like a funeral procession.</p><p>And there was a fine box of old oak that Ginny was carrying, just about the right size, and …</p><p>“Oh.” Bella felt herself lose all expression, too, and Andromeda blanched, and stiffened.</p><p>“<span>I’m very, very sorry,” Andromeda whispered to the girls. </span></p><p>“<span>He never got a chance to be his own man. Dumbledore manipulated him from the start, to play his part. Maybe failing was the first time he was free from being someone else’s pawn. After five years of smoking cigarettes with the Russian Army I can safely say that was all some fucked up shit,” Hermione answered. “Fuck, I miss him. God. That’s what they were here for. </span><em><span>For Harry. </span></em><span>For Harry’s head!” They had not found it with the others at Hogwarts, and Hermione had just set it aside. Refused to think about it. Refused to think about what it had meant. Buried it deep and turned it into the anger she had run on while liberating the British Isles. She looked up to Bellatrix, shaking her head, shaking herself slowly. “Why is he so obsessed with Harry, Bella? Even now? Why? Why couldn’t he let him rest in peace? He killed him, he won, he left me and Ginny and Ron and Luna and all of us to stumble along and pick up the pieces and fight to keep hope alive… Harry wasn’t even allowed to rest in one piece? Really? Why does he hate him so much? He sent Jugson here in the middle of this fucking Death Eater Tet Offensive to </span><em><span>find Harry Potter’s Head? </span></em><span>Why?” </span></p><p>
  <span>Bellatrix frowned, and looked back to Jugson, feeling incredulous for a moment. And then a thought came to her, like they had never really escaped the original mission which had brought the two of them back together, the mission she had been sent on to Koschei’s Palace. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Koschei the Deathless. </span>
  </em>
  <span>She was very well read and had studied the myths exhaustively, and knew Hermione was exactly the same way and… “Hermione, the Water of Death. We have access to the Water of Life, so if we had access to the Water of Death… No magic can restore someone to life, except that’s not true. If you use the Water of Life and the Water of Death you can bring someone back to life. At least, in principle. Master Flyorov should know more, someone should Floo him. Uhm…” In front of her, Hermione and Ginny had frozen like ghosts at the prospect. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Bellatrix forced a wan smile. “Voldemort is still scared shitless of him, I think. He’s afraid that we’ll bring Harry back from the dead and Harry will still defeat him according to the prophecy. That’s the only reason for him to go to this length that makes sense, at all. He’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>scared. </span>
  </em>
  <span>He’s Tom Fucking Riddle and he’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>scared.</span>
  </em>
  <span>”</span>
</p><p>Hermione looked at her as if, just very subtly, but quite profoundly, something had changed.</p><p>Then Narcissa turned back to them. “I have the location of the statue. Ladies, I’ve overheard what you’ve been talking about, and I understand perfectly that this fine young man demands a proper funeral. But, we must act to save the city. I must have you rally to me. Right now. We need to go, while there’s still a chance.”</p><p>Ginny quietly set the box down on the plinth of the statue that they were about to go destroy.</p><p>Hermione gave one single nod.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>203's -- 203mm or 8-inch artillery is quite rare in the modern world, but notable for being able to fire tactical nuclear artillery shells. These would be the 2S7 Pion.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0080"><h2>80. Face to Face</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Apparation always had an element of risk to it. This was unavoidable, and one of the reasons why many witches and wizards never actually learned how to perform it, that and the intense discomfort. One of the most dangerous possibilities with apparation was that one could apparate into wards meant to block it.</p><p>There were <em>protections </em>for that. They, too, had an element of risk in them. Hermione had, in fact, never had to rely on that advanced magic before, woven into the act of disapparation by her intent as they left the Ministry of Magic. But today, suddenly, she felt a sensation in the middle of apparation that was worse than anything else that she had ever known.</p><p>An interrupted apparation took every bad feeling she’d ever experienced in the midst of apparation, and magnified it a hundred times. It was like a storm of pain, a twisting, wrenching feeling through her entire body, nausea, agony, disorientation and confusion all combined into one. She lost the food she had eaten hours before, without even thinking about it, and she wasn’t the only one who did, either. To be honest, as her mind started processing again, Hermione thought that the experience had been worse than being hit by a <em>Crucio.</em></p><p>She only dimly became aware of the hammering of a group of machine-guns. They were very close, and the action sounded absolutely desperate. Then, suddenly, she realised that a massive horde of Inferi was almost upon them, and only three machine-guns from a platoon of the Black Guards, hammering away with incendiary and tracer bullets while rocket-flamethrowers tore chunks in the horrible, hideous mass, were keeping them from being overrun.</p><p>The men firing phosphorous grenades from the under-barrel launchers on their rifles looked desperate, resigned, terrified. They were at the point of breaking, their barricades being actively physically assaulted, the dead only feet away from them and livid and angry, eager to claim their bodies and add them to their own as only the continuous fire held them back, and it was a thin and fading chance that their line would hold.</p><p>And then with a grunt and a gasp, a little woman, all of 5’2”, hair like a tangled mop of black above her uniform, kicked herself up into a kneeling position, her boot in her own vomit. A sneer of contempt for danger was on her face. Her bent wand was in her hand, and her face was filled with contempt and defiance for the foe, the monster behind the inferi. “<em>Bombarda Maxima Incendiarus!”</em></p><p>The curse sailed across their defenders and spun down neatly, controlled through the air by adjustments, snaps of her wrist of her wand, and detonated in the midst of the Inferi with a terrible surge and whoosh of flame that vanished a huge mass of them.</p><p>Her Bella. Her Bella, who never quit and always fought to the end and didn’t know the meaning of the word danger.</p><p>And then the second went off.</p><p>Andromeda. Just as strong as her sister.</p><p>Hermione never imagined she’d have ever seen Narcissa Malfoy lose her lunch, or breakfast in this case, but they all had, and it didn’t stop her. It didn’t stop <em>Hermione, </em>either, as she struggled to her feet, and joined in the magical counterassault.</p><p>The gunners had a moment to frantically pour water on the barrels, the sound of sizzling and crackling. It was followed by oil, from the spare can in one of the APCs they had arrived in, which had been knocked on its side by a surge of Inferi against it and now served as part of their barricade. A coating of oil on the guns, gently smoking. The barrels might well be close enough to melting that their accuracy was shot, but they didn’t need it to defeat <em>this </em>enemy. They just needed maximum fire, for as long as they could have it. They attached new belts, cycled the actions… Opened fire again. Bent and burnt replacement barrels showed they had already ruined at least per gun as they fired and fired and fired, linking belts on the fly so that there was no pause in their fire, in the stutter of tracers going down range.</p><p>Now all five of the witches were in the fight over them. They tore through the depths of this horde of the dead, incinerating the next block of the street. While the men with gun and grenade held them off at point-blank, the witches worked further down, avoiding the risk of hurting their own men while they ranged down the street and burned through the rest of the mass.</p><p>It was a spectacle of fire and fury and utter desperation. They ripped through their enemy with the pitilessness of someone who was executing a slaughter, who hated what they were fighting, who knew that there was nothing human on the other side. Buildings burning, set alight by the magical firebombs detonating in the middle of the street, clouding and choking the sky with black smoke, buffeting in gusts over their position, soot caking at their skin and the June sun overhead well-obscured.</p><p>And then it was over. There were simply no more of the dead who were coming through the smoke. The fire continued with hesitations and pauses until the order rang out from Hermione’s lover’s clear and sharp voice. “Cease fire!”</p><p>She spun her wand and slipped it delicately into the holster at her belt. Flashed a little wink to Hermione, then addressed the Platoon Lieutenant. “Good job, Leftenant. Get your men a rest.”</p><p>“We were going to retreat, but when you arrived,” he offered, saluting, stuttering, emotionally not much better than the dead they had just been fighting, “we stayed, to cover you, but if it had been another...”</p><p>“And you did, that’s the only part that matters—you were needed and you did your job. We had a bad apparation, Leftenant, we would have been overrun if you had fallen back. And we were fucked up too,” Bellatrix offered. “That was at least a minute to recover. Considering you just saved the life of the Prime Minister and Regent, I’d say that’s a Victoria’s Cross for you.”</p><p>The young Leftenant stared blankly in the exhaustion that took hold, like a spell, at the moment of a pause in a battle, not really thinking about such things at the moment. He nodded, once, and turned to order his men to turn out, to get some water, and maybe food, if they could stomach it.</p><p>Hermione watched the exchange, and then saw the platoon sergeant strike up a cigarette. She’d been doing so well about this, ever since being healed of her addiction at Ararat, but the crushing psychological burden of the battle against the Inferi in the streets of London was just too much—she felt guilty as she stepped over to the platoon sergeant, but it didn’t stop her. “Hey, can you spare a cigarette?”</p><p>He handed one over with a light, wordlessly, and Hermione felt like a drowning woman given a life ring as she took a long drag and turned slowly around, looking at the ruins ahead of them, the life that would keep going on behind them, the abrupt change from a world destroyed to a world damaged but intact, the story of two city blocks.</p><p>Narcissa wiped her face off with a handkerchief. “Well. We must be on our way. We have to destroy the statue.”</p><p>“And get Hermione away from the muggle cancer sticks,” Bellatrix added, eliciting a blush of embarrassment from Hermione despite everything. It was not strong enough to keep her from taking another drag, however.</p><p>“How are we going to get there now?” Ginny asked.</p><p>Andromeda, who had been looking around, slyly pointed toward a 1989 Vauxhall Nova sitting abandoned behind the defensive position. It was at least the GSi. “We could drive the rest of the way.”</p><p>“Oh Gods.” Bellatrix stared blankly at her. “You want to go <em>driving, </em>in the middle of an Inferi horde that’s overrunning London?”</p><p>“I’m a very good driver, and unless you have a better idea when there’s an anti-apparation field?” Andromeda asked smugly.</p><p>“She has a point, Bella,” Narcissa wandered over toward it. “But, Andy, you haven’t the keys for it.”</p><p>“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Andromeda pointed her wand at the door and commanded it to open. Then she swung herself down in the driver’s seat and reached around to the hazard warning light switch. Pausing for a moment to put on her driving gloves that she retrieved from a pocket in her coat, with all the delicacy of a proper lady, she popped out the hazard warning light switch, reversed it to be upside down, and then put it back in again.</p><p>The ignition came on.</p><p>Hermione, cigarette dangling from her mouth, stared. Of all the things she had expected Andromeda Black Tonks to know how to do… “Damnit, Andy, where the bloody hell did you learn that?”</p><p>“Oh, Ted knew a thing or…”</p><p>“Was he a criminal?” Bellatrix blurted.</p><p>Andy shot her sister a dirty look. “Shut up, and get in. We’re <em>driving, </em>Bella. He was a Cockney boy, and his muggle friends learned car tricks. Leave it at that. Hermione, can you get some of the soldiers to give us a bump start?”</p><p>Hermione pinched the cigarette and pulled it from her lips. “Unfortunately, Andy, we’ve got problems. There’s another group of Inferi coming on,” she gestured down the road, her eyes hidden behind the shades, feeling suddenly very tired. The leftenant and the sergeants were already shouting, calling their men back to their arms, back to their positions.</p><p>“Then you’ll need to stay and help the platoon hold,” Narcissa looked to the two younger women. “Sorry, but, someone has to.”</p><p>“Agreed,” Hermione gave a single nod.</p><p>“Damnit Cissy,” Bellatrix began, but Hermione just shook her head, smiling wryly, and turned to two of the soldiers jogging toward their positions. “Hey guys, come on over! You’ll get to say you gave the Prime Minister a bump start.”</p><p>Bellatrix stared at her with a longing moment of regret, that made Hermione bite her lip and for a moment want to cry, but then with Ginny and the two men, they got behind the Vauxhall and shoved it forward until the engine caught and roared to life, with Andromeda holding the transmission in first gear. A moment later, dousing them in engine exhaust, she was off and roaring, crisply dodging the debris and hooking down a side-street before the Inferi arrived.</p><p>Hermione watched Bellatrix give a sort of lonely wave goodbye out of one window, and then sucked down the last of her cigarette and tossed the butt to the pavement.</p><p>Ginny shook her head. “You’re crazy in love, Hermione.”</p><p>“I need another cigarette before we come under attack,” Hermione answered dismissively, refusing to answer it. But Ginny was right. And Hermione didn’t give a damn about it, either.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Bellatrix wasn’t sure if this was the most absolutely the most ridiculous thing that had happened to her or just close to it, at this point. Oh, not the worst, or the most horrifying, but the most fucking <em>ridiculous. </em></p><p>They went tearing through the streets and Cissy could barely keep up with her in flinging fireballs at groups of Inferi as Andy was constantly shifting, braking, working the clutch, her gloved hands spinning on the stained old steering wheel with a manic grin on her face that confirmed at last for the world to see that the mousy middle sister was, in fact, a <em>Black. </em></p><p>Actually, Bella kind of loved that.</p><p>Andy hooked another sharp skid turn, putting down rubber as she used brakes, transmission and then the gas pedal in a symphony of machinery that coaxed an almost impossible performance out of the ridiculous little car. Bellatrix leaned out the window, relying on the seatbelt but feeling like it restrained her more than she was comfortable with, a whisper of distant Azkaban. On the other hand, she didn’t want to fall the fuck out, either.</p><p>A snap of her wand, and she knocked an abandoned bus out of the way. “There you go, Andy!”</p><p>“Bloody hell, Bella, <em>tell me when!</em>” Andy exclaimed, even as she took advantage of the gap, and Narcissa somewhat delicately, but very precisely, sent a fireball down one of the cross-streets when she spied Inferi further down.</p><p>The engine protested as the RPMs abruptly changed through the shift. Bella wondered how long it would take for Andy’s shoe to wear a hole in the carpet…</p><p>Narcissa sank back, breathing hard. “There’s so many of them. I don’t think we have much time until the defences collapse entirely.”</p><p>Bellatrix couldn’t help but think of Hermione, left behind with a platoon of Black Guards with half-melted machine-guns and dwindling ammunition, and a single Weasley. “They are starting to spread through the streets,” she acknowledged, eyes wide with that fanatical intensity that still came naturally to her. Even as she spoke, she was tipped into the door of the car as they screamed through another ninety-degree turn and had to negotiate a slalom course of abandoned cars. “Damnit Andy, you are having too much fun with us!”</p><p>“I am trying to keep you alive and get you to a scrap yard on the outskirts of London as fast as I bloody well can,” she snapped back, shifting up as they accelerated after pulling straight in a stretch of empty and open road. “Now mind ahead, let’s clear some roadblocks before we get to them!”</p><p>Bellatrix leaned out of the window, the airflow buffeting her head and face and sand and grit pounding at her, her hair trailing behind her wildly. With a smirking grin, she called out a bubble-head charm and the clinging magic bubble of air served just as well as a face shield. “Cissy, bubble-head! It works much better!”</p><p>Her younger sister muttered something irritated about her irrepressible cleverness and followed suit. The two snapped their wands, making objects featherweight and pushing them aside.</p><p>Andy shot through a narrow gap between rubble and an abandoned vehicle, and then there was the sickening pop of one of the tyres going. They skidded hard to the right and she cursed and fought the wheel. “Bella, <em>Pop the second one! In the back! Left!” </em>Cursing again, she overcorrected and then corrected again, fighting the tendency to spin out of control as she ran on one rim.</p><p>Sloshed from side to side and glad she’d already thrown up, Bella leaned out the side of the tiny nightmare. A cutting spell. Against a tyre.</p><p>Two rims in the back, wheels in the front. Good enough. Andy straightened out, still driving at a shockingly fast speed for the conditions and now the condition of the vehicle, too.</p><p>Bellatrix started laughing in manic hysteria. “Gods, Andy, you’ve lived for this, it seems.”</p><p>“Well it seems she has, but she’s right out as the Minister of Transport,” Cissy added as she sank back to the cushions of the front passenger seat. “I think speed limits on muggle motorways clearly exist for a reason: Avoiding giving the passengers heart attacks.”</p><p>Andromeda struck a defiant, proud, bemused thrust of her face up in an exaggerated way, and then swung them down one street. “Complain or not, here we are.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“I thought you said you were going to quit,” Ginny remarked softly, looking at the second cigarette in Hermione’s lips in five minutes.</p><p>Hermione couldn’t avoid looking at her balefully, and defiantly took another drag. She didn’t give a shit anymore. “That was before hundreds of thousands of Inferi erupted from the ground in London.”</p><p>“Sorry,” Ginny responded lamely, her face a white sheet, as they turned back to what they were were about to face again. “Do you think we have the range? I’m starting to worry we’re depleting our magical cores.”</p><p>“We probably are, throwing the same spell over and over again,” Hermione shrugged. “Well, we’ve got to do it, so we’ll do it. I think we’ve got the range now.”</p><p>Ginny’s eyes glinted for a moment, and she turned down-range. “Let’s.” She snapped her wand back as fine as a she could, and a moment later, Hermione joined her. They tore the front out of the wave of Inferi with interlocking explosive fire spells down a street already ruined by them, and all the better that the Inferi tended to keep launching frontal assaults on the same dozen locations or so in the city, as it had the effect of minimising the area of damage.</p><p>Of course, on they still came. It was all well and good only if they could hold them, and the same groups were under constant attack, while others, protecting groups of civilians, found their undead, unnatural enemy never approaching them. But who knew what passed for sense in Voldemort’s black soul.</p><p>Back in the saddle again, they slung their wands against an enemy that didn’t stop. The Inferi were unbreakable, they could only be <em>destroyed. </em>Once again, now, the machine-guns opened fire, the remaining belts of incendiary ammunition torn through with terrible rapidity. It seemed like only a coda to the effort of the two witches, though. Against this horde, soldiers with incendiary weapons could die bravely, and buy time for civilians to run—unless aerial support turned the tide in their favour. Witches could simply annihilate the attack.</p><p>Jets streaked overhead, laden with fuel-air explosives. Ten hours in, the fate of London hung in the balance. They could stop the outbreaks now, or the city would be utterly destroyed, fatally damaged, as ruined as Hamburg or Dresden.</p><p>Breathing hard, through air choked with oily smoke, through the stench and the heat, the world tinted through dark sunglasses. The mass of Inferi <em>slowed down, </em>deterred by the flames ahead of them as the first wave burned. It was the closest thing to a loss of morale they had, the natural aversion to fire that was inbuilt in the spell.</p><p>With the blocks ahead already ruined by fire, it was as good a chance as she was going to get. “Hold them for just a minute, Ginny!”</p><p>Ginny knew what she was going to do, but this time, there was no complaint, no hesitation. She covered down for them both.</p><p>“<em>Fiendfyre</em>!” And Hermione tamed it and trained, spun it and whirled it, called it forth as a roaring herd of animals, pounding into the mass, spinning, looping, catching the outriders of the Inferi, hammering through the centre of the great mass. Kept it together for as long as she needed it, controlled it up until the end, never once lost the direction of the living fire, kept it contained within the firebreak of already burned-out buildings, incinerated the mass, and used all of her skill and all of her talent, the Brightest Witch of <em>Her </em>Age, to wipe out another entire column of the monstrous dead.</p><p>The streets in front of them suddenly fell silent, and only the sounds of guns and jets and bombs and artillery and the wail of sirens, all distant but also close, were sounding from blocks and blocks away. Ahead of them, secondary flames guttered and choked, and the stench of the burning of old flesh wafted over them.</p><p>Hermione had been pushed to the limit, she had pushed herself, pushed her magical core to the limit. But until the end, it was skill rather than strength that mattered, and this time, there had been no losing control.</p><p>She dropped down into the seat of an empty Land Rover, breathing hard, looking around and slowly convincing herself that they had held, just like they had held the gateway to Diagon Alley earlier in the day. She wasn’t even sure where in London she was, it didn’t even matter, it was just one more place where in front of her everything was destroyed and behind her everything was safe.</p><p>Ginny came up and shoved a canteen into her hands. “Drink before you faint, ‘Mione.”</p><p>She guzzled the water. In the strange lassitude after combat, there was only concern in her mind. “Do you think they got there?”</p><p>“I can’t believe <em>you two, </em>but I think Bellatrix will do just fine.” A pause. “’Mione, what about Harry?”</p><p>Hermione looked up. “When this is over, we all get together and talk. We all plan. I won’t say more until then, Ginny. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The three Black sisters rushed into the scrap yard. A place where muggles used torches and jackhammers to cut apart the ruined detritus of their own civilisation was a fitting place for the end of the Might of Magic statue… Except, if they had tried cutting into it, they would have found an unpleasant surprise with how enchanted it was.</p><p>The three came to a stop before it, in a yard empty, abandoned, the workers having long fled, having no idea of what they held. A few diagnostic spells quickly showed the magnitude of the talisman that they now collectively faced.</p><p>“We will have to sever the tie to him, before we can destroy it,” Andy observed after a moment. “Cissy, you’re the best Legilimens among us…”</p><p>The elegant blonde of the Black sisters nodded. “Then I suppose it is time for me to be reacquainted with Lord Voldemort,” she said, settling on the balls of her feet, rocked back, wand ready. She focused on the statue—and froze in place.</p><p>The expression on her face became a rictus. Sweat beaded from her face. Her wand-hand shook with the intensity of the unseen war that she was fighting.</p><p>Andy glanced from Cissy to Bella with a look of discomfort. “She’s fighting him? Now? Gods, Bella, I think that’s blood from her eyes.”</p><p>“I think you’re right,” Bellatrix grimaced, feeling that Narcissa was pushed to the limit, straining, so far into her battle that she wasn’t even noticing the two of them talking. And Bella was the second best of the Legilimens among them. She raised her own wand, despite …</p><p>Time stood still.</p><p><em> Bella, welcome back, </em> His voice echoed in her mind. <em> It’s been a while, I believe the only longer time that we haven’t spoken in your adult life was when you were in Azkaban. I suppose you liked it more than I thought. I have to admit, it would be a delight to send you back, but despite your newfound love of the Order of the Phoenix, it seems you or at least your sister is still a Slytherin. Very clever of the two of you. </em></p><p>Bellatrix was frozen under the power, too. <em> I just wanted Azkaban destroyed, do you think… </em></p><p>
  <em> That my Death Eaters weren’t happy? Of course they were happy, since so many of them spent time there. But it was a hardening place, a place that made them more to my liking. Not you, apparently. I made you everything that you are, Bella. I gave you the daughter you betrayed me for. And now … A mudblood? Really? </em>
</p><p><em> TOM RIDDLE. FATHER: A MUGGLE. </em> Bellatrix tore back at him in defiance and rage. <em> MY LINE HAVE BEEN WIZARDS AND WITCHES OF BRITAIN FOR THREE THOUSAND YEARS. </em></p><p><em> As was my mother’s line! </em> He tore back in rage. <em> But you shove your tongue into something that came out of two muggles. </em></p><p>
  <em> Then we’re all the same now, aren’t we!? But my line will endure. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> And mine. Win or lose, after all. If I win I live forever, and if I lose, you will nurse the House of Gaunt at your side. You made that choice. </em>
</p><p><em> You have no right to her, and you abrogated your own power and claim! </em>The mental duel around them exploded in light and thunder.</p><p><em> Perhaps you are right. I created her, as another mark upon you. You can cut off your arm, Bella, but you can’t remove the stain on your soul. </em>His power descended upon her, overwhelming, overweening, buffeting her mind in waves.</p><p><em> I can make my own future, and in this you have no more power over me! You are a ruin, commanding your last offensive, in the ruins of a crumbling Empire, half a man, the shadow of what I once followed! </em>Bellatrix countered.</p><p>She felt the cold pit of despair open up around her soul.</p><p><em> Oh Bella, my lovely Bella, you could have stood by your Master, and enjoyed the power of our dark utopia. But now … You will die, and you will die more miserably than all on this world who have died before. </em>A suffocating, squeezing crush of power descended around her.</p><p>
  <em> I will not merely destroy you. I will feed you to Azi Dahaka, and obtain the utter extirpation of your soul. And I will do the same to our child, and thereby make sure that you understand the completeness of your defeat and how utterly I am removing the reward that I gave to you. </em>
</p><p>Then a third presence joined the fight. <em> You will not have her without a battle! </em>Andromeda exclaimed. She was the weakest, but her heart shone, untouched by the corruption that Voldemort had long indulged. Her presence was sufficient to free Narcissa from the locked-in mental battle that she had waged to a desperate stalemate with only Bella’s help.</p><p><em> You pushed us apart in school, </em> Cissy accused. <em> You drove the wedges that sent Andromeda away, disowned. That sent me to my marriage-bed, and that sent Bella into your power. You will not drive us apart again. </em></p><p><em> I wanted the ‘Brightest Witch of Her Age’, as pathetic as she turned out to be, </em>he cackled, but the power he brought against the three of them together was inadequate. They pushed him back, driving the shattered remnant of his soul away. Once this man might well have been too great for all of them, but he had sacrificed so much of himself…</p><p>And Bella felt the dim link to one more. An idea flickered within her. <em> Hope. The Water of Life… </em></p><p>That link, those whispered words <em> through Voldemort </em> to <em> Nagini, </em> prompted an immediate, unhinged, enraged response. <em> Damn you all! You will not! You will not! I will let just a measure of Azi Dahaka into me, I will control his power in this world, and I will suborn it utterly to my power! Those who obey me will prosper, and those who do not will be as cattle to the Devourer of Worlds! </em></p><p>But his words, his rage, were as an uncoordinated flailing. Andromeda pushed back: <em> Perhaps, but not today, Tom. Not today. </em></p><p>The three sisters came together. With a roaring scream of defiance, they pried Voldemort loose and sent him back to Anatolia, metaphorically and magically. As they did, Andromeda, the least invested in the mental fight, snapped a <em> Bombarda Maxima. </em></p><p>The statue disintegrated into a million bits.</p><p>All across the city, on that horrible June evening, the Inferi withered away, collapsing and fading into piles of bones.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Some notes:</p><p>1. Yes, you really can do that to a Vauxhall Nova... Or at least an episode of Top Gear would have you believe it, anyway. </p><p>2. Bump start is where you put a manual in gear and then push it to force the ignition of the cylinders and starting the engine. It does require the ignition to be on to provide a spark. </p><p>3. Many machine guns intended for continuous fire had water or oil cooling jackets. The barrel can get quite hot in sustained continuous fire, and it's very intensive and a main limiting factor in the rate of fire. Of course those men wouldn't have cared much. They did have quick change barrels, but were outright wrecking them from the heat. In the modern day, most machine-gunners only fire in disciplined six-round bursts, but this was, of course, insuffiicent against the Inferi. So one option is simply pouring more water and oil on them to try and cool them. </p><p>4. Continuous or linked belts are where belts, typically of 250-rounds of ammunition, can be linked while they are being fired, so the loader can hook a second belt onto the first while the first is being pulled through the action of a machine-gun. This allows for fire to be continuous without a pause to load a new belt and cycle the action. </p><p>5. Fuel-air munitions disperse an aerosolised flammable into the atmosphere and then detonate it. They're also called thermobaric weapons, and they're quite popular with the Russian armed forces. </p><p>6. Tracer ammunition generates light on incendiary principles, but is distinct from true incendiary bullets; but both involve flame and could be used in this pinch, as tracer would be much more common, for marking targets for other weapons in more normal circumstances.</p><p>7. Here's a short documentary on the rocket-flamethrower:</p><p>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gUtk3RaQ9c</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0081"><h2>81. That was a Day, Indeed.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The women were so exhausted. It had been a tremendous battle, a wild battle, as intense as anything she had yet lived. The brush with her former Lord still left her shaking, exhausted in this bone-dead way she hadn’t known since her escape from Azkaban. Bellatrix thought it was like another of Kipling’s poems, damn the Lovegood girl for putting them in her head:</p><p>
  <em><br/>Sodden, and chafed and aching,<br/>Gone in the loins and knees–<br/>No matter–the day is breaking,<br/>And there's far less weight to the seas!<br/>Up mast, and finish baling–<br/>In oar, and out with mead–<br/>The rest will be two-reef sailing...<br/>That was a night indeed!<br/></em>
</p><p>Bellatrix didn’t much like it, for the chorus when it was put to song:</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>But we hold it in all disaster<br/>(And faith, we have found it true!)<br/>If only you stand by your Master,<br/>The Gods will stand by you! </em>
</p><p> </p><p>But it was what it was, and being loyal to family mattered, too.</p><p>They got back to Ancient House, with a Protection force and some of Cissy’s aides as Prime Minister. All were shocked, even if they were disciplined not to mutter too much, at what precisely the Seat of the House of Black <em>was. </em>“A Roman villa,” one of the younger communications aides muttered.</p><p>Bellatrix shot her a look. “A British villa.”</p><p>“The <em>Dubh, </em>as they were called in those days, could afford Roman luxury, but were always British,” Hermione explained diplomatically. The house-elves had prepared lemonade for them—Hermione looked ahead. “Oh, Old Fashioned Lemonade. Lovely right now.”</p><p>Calling it ‘old-fashioned lemonade’ got a confused look from Bellatrix for a moment, who decided in the end it was some muggleborn thing and best not to bring it up—and Bellatrix wanted to guzzle it by the bucket-full, anyway. Cissy gestured to her guards. “Drink, drink,” she insisted. “There will be enough for all of us, as much as we want, and the house-elves are preparing quarters for all of you in the <em>Villa Rustica.</em>”</p><p>“Muggles in Ancient House,” Bellatrix shook her head, leaning on the wall in exhaustion, already on her second glass of lemonade.</p><p>“It happened centuries ago, Bella,” Andy observed with a faint grin. It was infectious, Bellatrix grinned too.</p><p>They could hear the sound of children, evacuees, in the other rooms of the Villa, but they were too exhausted to follow up. Delphini, however, was not too exhausted to wander in… And then sprint for her mother to give her a hug that sent Bellatrix half-toppling into the wall, arrested only by Andy’s ready hand on her back.</p><p>“Woah, there, little witchling…”</p><p>“Mum, you’re back! My new friends said bad things…”</p><p>“I’m back,” Bellatrix agreed, and held her tightly, even with a body so bone tired that she was physically shaking. “Mum is very tired, and you’ve already eaten, but we haven’t. So we’re going to have an adult meal, and then settle down and take a bath, darling.”</p><p>Delphi looked at her thoughtfully. “I could eat a second dinner, mum. Especially the dessert.”</p><p>Bellatrix grinned, and forced herself to hoist her daughter up, despite her fatigue. “How about no, dear. But I will tuck you in.”</p><p>“Awwh, mum..” But it didn’t stop her from being carried away.</p><p>Food was prepared, the elves avoiding being seen by muggles; the next dining room was prepared for the horribly dirty group. Bellatrix, having used a few scourgify spells on herself rather than soil her daughter’s bedroom, returned five minutes later looking cleaning than the others but even more exhausted than she had been, so that Hermione quietly squeezed her hand as she slipped past.</p><p>The meal was one of those simple ones that became a lavish feast because of what you had experienced: Roast beef and hot buttered bread; in any other circumstance, it would have been much too simple to be served at table at Ancient House, but they had all been vomiting, torn through disapparation a hair’s breadth from splinching against an anti-apparation ward, fighting the dead, covered in the residue of fires, of grime, of blood, of sweat. Empty stomachs and utter exhaustion. It might as well have been a true feast measured against that standard, a full seven courses.</p><p>Then the family retreated, at last, to the baths. Cold, warm, hot water, blazing hot steam, it was all there. Soiled clothes were tossed away for the elves to deal with. Bellatrix was far too used to communal bathing to hesitate in the slightest sense, and they all plunged down, using cleaning spells and heat and water and traditional scrapers—pretty much anything which could be put to the service of cleaning off the battle as much as possible.</p><p>Staring in a little daze, Hermione just watched as Bellatrix dragged herself up close behind her younger lover, and rubbed her shoulders in front of her sisters. “Now that was a day,” Bellatrix whispered headily. “You did splendidly.”</p><p>Ginny was staring, and Hermione blushing by that point. With a wry smile, her left arm gleaming gold, Bellatrix slipped away, held her nose, ducked completely underwater, let it even soak out her hair. There was something relaxing in not giving a damn, but Hermione was not quite there yet.</p><p>Their spring victory really had been too easy. <em>Now you’ve earned it, </em>she thought, floating in peace below the water for a moment, before she rose to the surface of the blazing hot pool. Hermione couldn’t help but smile as she rose.</p><p>“Let us all get a well-earned sleep,” Narcissa reminded them gently. “We will need it.”</p><p>Nobody needed any urging. Cooling off, drying with drying charms to get their hair out of a miserable damp state before sleep, with fresh night-clothes and evening robes laid out, they all parted ways, except for Bellatrix and Hermione—straight to the same room. But there was nothing passionate in it, no desire. There was simply no energy for it that night. Even the manic Bellatrix had been worn down to the point that she was mellow and content, even if it was only exhaustion that had done it, and she and everyone else knew that.</p><p>Hermione tugged her the last bit of the way to her black satin sheets. With a start, Bellatrix realised that she had just been standing at the verge of her room, staring blankly at the wall. “C’mon,” the younger witch whispered. “I’m going to sleep so long, and so close to you…”</p><p>Bellatrix couldn’t muster a word to say. She just brushed a kiss against Hermione as she pulled Bella into bed. A single light cover was pulled over, the others under. The two witches nestled together in a state of bone dead exhaustion, but perfect safety, too, behind the immensely old and powerful wards of Ancient House.</p><p>Within five minutes, she drifted to sleep, her golden arm still warm from the bath, and pushed up under Hermione, where it wouldn’t feel pain or go numb from her weight atop it. A groggy last thought—perhaps becoming a glorious amputee had not been so bad, after all.</p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>Alexandra slumped down, lower into her camp chair, in the revetment which concealed her command tent. Even in June, this far into the interior, the mountains of eastern Anatolia could be bitterly cold at night. Her greatcoat was pulled over her like a blanket. Steam wafted off of her tea. She was terrifically tired, but who could sleep after a day like that, with twelve hours of desperate preparation to launch an unplanned spoiling offensive into the teeth of an enemy still conducting offensive operations against them. Everyone fully rigged in their CBRN gear, because they would be attacking through the cleared routes created by eight nuclear bombs.</p><p>Just to have it cancelled, two hours before the attack was to begin.</p><p>She wasn’t complaining, nobody was in the entire Corps. They had taken thirty percent casualties or more in the fighting of the past weeks, and they’d take another thirty percent in a single day if they launched that attack. They had lived for one more day. It was just like a drill, but a drill which had been real, right up until the moment it wasn’t.</p><p>There was nothing peaceful about the night, despite that. She was bone tired, but sleepless as a veteran usually wasn’t sleepless. On rotations back to the homeland, she had sometimes boasted that she could sleep inside of a washing machine after sleeping on the front. Six years of war, and despite all the terrible blows they had inflicted upon him in the past two years, the enemy was still able to conduct offensive operations. If anything, as the war grew more intractable, the monster on the other side of the mountains grew more awful, more horrifying in what he did to people, to the world.</p><p>Which meant they could not let up.</p><p>She raised the cup to her mouth with a shaking hand, and revelled in the hot feeling down her throat.</p><p>There was a little part of her that had wanted the attack, anyway, that was frustrated it had been cancelled at the last minute. The hungry part of you, which wants to prove you can do the impossible—a necessary part of being an aggressive military officer. It was not like the night was quiet, anyway. It was only ‘quiet’ by the standards of the front. One could hear artillery and machine-gun fire in the distance. There was always some harassment fire, some shifting of troops which were detected by a battery covering a particular sector. Some men hastening out to repair wire or place mines, who were detected and engaged by an enemy machine-gun.</p><p>And the front had not become static. Voldemort would attack again. He’d have to, having lost Britain. His capacity for offensive operations would be lost soon enough, surely. It was now or never…</p><p>
  <em> We will be sorely pressed to hold. The entire front is on the edge of collapse, even though we put on a brave face. To roll the dice with a counterattack might well have been worth it. </em>
</p><p>There were footsteps. She looked up: General Pronichev. Alexandra set her tea aside and rose quickly, to salute. He waved her wave.</p><p>“It’s been a long day, Colonel. At ease.” He went to take another of the camp chairs.</p><p>“Sir.”</p><p>“We have some good news from all of this. The nuclear weapons—the detection charms the enemy has for them are too much risk of finding them if they’re moved again. We used a very special team to get them here,” he explained. “So, we’re being allowed to use them in support of our defensive positions. I believe it greatly improves our ability to hold, or at least to slow down a major offensive.”</p><p>“It will, Sir, it will. You know, we might even be able to salvage the planning.”</p><p>“An active defence, yes.”</p><p>“Exactly—use the nukes to launch a location spoiling attack when they begin their next offensive, to reach the lake.”</p><p>“Colonel, you really do believe the mountain is the whole sum of his objectives?”</p><p>“I do, Sir. The wizards are clear on it. And I fear, greatly, what would come of it. I think the Government has sent so many troops here with good reason.”</p><p>“Then there better be a solution for his existence soon. I think we’re running out of time,” he answered, voice calm but his words not, looking to the starry sky above. “He’s desperate, he needs a victory before the power of his armies here begins to wane. And we need time to grow our logistical network in this land. But we don’t have it. So, no matter what we try, we’re just running out of time. I do hope our magical friends have something they can do.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>Morning at Ancient House. Hermione and Ginny, Narcissa and Andromeda, Bellatrix … And Delphini, and Teddy (who was starting to speak English without a Russian accent again. Children were quick about these things), and then Tonks arrived, and swept her son up in her arms. Bellatrix had Delphini in a chair right next to her own, on her left side, with Hermione on her right, and Delphini’s chair was pulled in until it touched her own and her daughter was leaning against her.</p><p>“You were in the city, too, Dora?” Andy asked wearily to her daughter.</p><p>“I was,” Tonks acknowledged with a sigh, before smiling again and ruffling her son’s hair. “C’mon, little man, let’s have breakfast.”</p><p>Draco and Larissa arrived soon after. They had also been at London, but Larissa still looked better than she had after the taking of Britain—a month of near to bed-rest with Draco and house elves seeing after her at the Malfoy Manor had done her much good, enough that she had handled a day’s worth of savage combat on short notice with that irrepressible grin returned to her face when she settled down. “The English country breakfast never disappoints.” A full and proper breakfast, with fish, indeed awaited.</p><p>Hermione observed how they did not discuss anything of import, not in front of the children, not here, not after the terrible battle of the day before.</p><p>“Tell me about the new friends you’ve made,” Bella’s attention was focused on Delphi, turned away from her, and other than the occasional brush of a hand or other gentle touch that Hermione got in, she was being ignored… And she was perfectly all right with that. Delphini was a part of their family too, and needed Bella’s attention, too.</p><p>“They’re all from Diagon Alley, Mum. Well, really they’re from other places but that’s where they came to Ancient House from, and I had to be the Lady of the House for them … Because you were busy!”</p><p>“I was very busy, dearie,” Bellatrix acknowledged with a ghost of a sad smile. It was a sign, to Hermione, that she was badly affected by the battle in London, and the confrontation with Voldemort. She lingered as breakfast was finished, and didn’t want to join the other adults in the atrium, but in the end, Hermione standing there in the verge of the door watching her, Bellatrix kissed her daughter’s cheeks and sent her off with the house elves. Then, she straightened up, and moved with indecorous haste to Hermione’s side, spun an arm around her, and walked out.</p><p>Narcissa had been reading reports all throughout breakfast, and now she was communicating via Floo and radio to follow up on them, surrounded by her staff. She looked up to the two of them, composed despite the time of stress. “Bellatrix, Hermione. Unfortunately the enemy used the cover of the attacks yesterday to begin offensives in both Brittany and Galicia. We are using allied air cover to defend Brittany, and sending reinforcements now that the situation in London has been dealt with, and I’m confident that we’ll hold there. However, Galicia is a much harder lift, and the Galician government will be sorely pressed. Bellatrix, I want to appoint you as commander of the forces there. I will have the Duke of Albemarle support you with the carriers, and a brigade of Marines. But mostly you must take all the available wizards to reinforce the conventional troops there, and try to stage a counterattack. I am not sure holding Galicia will be tenable, and that will look very bad, unless we can stage a convincing victory.”</p><p>“Mmn.” Bellatrix closed her eyes for a minute, and reached out to grab Hermione’s hand, ignoring the stares from some of the staff. Hermione felt like an electric shock had gone through her that Bellatrix had done that so blatantly in front of Narcissa’s government staff, but she didn’t want to let go, shake loose, or minimise it in any way whatsoever. She liked it.</p><p>“Well, Cissy,” Bellatrix began to speak. “The best thing would be Portugal. They were a traditional English ally, in the day; the northern part around Porto has strong elements of the Celtic customs itself. They have no reason to hate us as yet, and perhaps if I can win signal enough of a victory, we could begin the process of detaching some <em> real </em>countries from Voldemort’s grasp.”</p><p>“A rather large ‘If’ you’re giving to yourself,” Narcissa answered, “But certainly, that would be ideal. If nothing, just break the Morsmordre Army there and fight defensively—give them a good bloody nose. It’s good terrain for it.”</p><p>“Of course.” Bellatrix tipped a salute at her younger sister. “What about Portsmouth and Southampton?”</p><p>“I’ll be going there personally,” Narcissa answered, before pouring her sister a cup of tea. “Here, have something before you go to London and put your staff together – the Floo to Whitehall should be intact. Then, you should be able to reach El Ferrol by portkey.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Bella took the cup gladly, and a second followed for Hermione. She looked between the two sisters. Something was still on Bellatrix’s mind, even as Hermione was working herself up to ask where <em> she </em>would be going.</p><p>“Cissy,” Bellatrix began again. “I wanted to talk about Theo. Theodore Nott.”</p><p>Narcissa looked up.</p><p>“Before I go, I’d like to see his pardon go out.”</p><p>“We have a war to fight, Bella. I will get around to it. I have every intention of upholding our word. It was given collectively, with all of us present. I acknowledge that.”</p><p>“Maybe,” Bellatrix answered with black eyes gleaming with a strange, sharp seriousness, “I want <em> Toujours Pur </em>to mean something new now: Purity of heart, purity of thought, purity of deed. These purities that are worth keeping. We gave our word. The pardon, Cissy. You can write it faster than I can finish my tea.”</p><p>Hermione trembled. She had never thought of it like that. Somewhere, at the back of her mind, she knew there was going to be a reckoning with those words one day, sooner or later. Delphini by law was a halfblood, but also by law, the Heir Black. Even in the case of Draco, who someday now would have the rather more elevated title of Duke of Lancaster, Larissa might be a pureblood, but by the height of British fanaticism on the subject, the Princely House of Naryshkin would not be one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. What would the reckoning with <em> Toujours Pur </em>be, for these brave and strong women of the Jackdaw? In the middle of the war, still sorting out the exact contours of the family she had with Bellatrix and Delphini now, Hermione had not been prepared to bring it up, herself.</p><p>But Bellatrix had unflinchingly faced the fire first. “I want to help you to start writing that new chapter right now, Cissy.” Hand still at Hermione’s waist. Golden hand. No longer so uncomfortable with it.</p><p>Cissy looked at them for a moment, and then, unfussy, always business, she looked back down to her desk, took pen and paper, and wrote quick, in neat, precise and easily read strokes. She signed and dated it, and pressed her signet, and quickly called one of her aides over, speaking swiftly as she handed the letter over, and then dismissing him.</p><p>Bellatrix stood there, cuddled up against Hermione in the warmth of the rising sun. She drank her tea, and she had a little grin on her lips. Hermione couldn’t help it, she was grinning, too.</p><p>“Alright,” Narcissa turned back with a smile. “Now on to war for me, sister-mine. The Iberian Front is your’s to command.”</p><p>“What about Hermione?”</p><p>“I need her here, Bella. There are important matters that I must discuss with her.”</p><p>“Without me?”</p><p>“With you,” Narcissa nodded. “I need to meet with the Taoiseach here in just another hour, and Hermione was the one who liberated him from Voldemort’s power. I need her here for that. I understand he and his cabinet are singing a different tune, after what they witnessed in London yesterday, and I want to strike while the iron is hot to come up with a reasonable modus vivendi.”</p><p>“That isn’t all, though, is it?”</p><p>Narcissa looked up. “No, it isn’t, Bella.” She opened a drawer in her desk, and flicked her wand at something. “As I said, you are to command the Iberian front. Field Marshal.”</p><p>Bellatrix stared at the British Army Field Marshal’s Baton her sister had just transfigurated and handed to her. “Are you serious?”</p><p>“For the saviour of London? Certainly.”</p><p>“We saved London <em> together, </em>” Bellatrix almost stuttered. “It shouldn’t just be me.”</p><p>“A significant fraction of the world’s population doesn’t want me dead. And absolutely none of it, save a very small group around a tottering Dark Lord, wants Andy dead. You, on the other hand, sister-mine, need all the damned help you can get. You saved London from the hordes of Inferi, and you’re being promoted for it. You’re the heroine of the British nation, at least as long as I have anything to say about it, and for the moment that’s a very great deal. Now shut up and deal with it. And don’t ask what I’m about to do.”</p><p>Bellatrix raised her right hand in salute, gripping the baton in her golden left. Then with a curled smirk, that grin that showed she enjoyed herself far too much, she pulled Hermione in, and the younger witch found herself locked in the passionate embrace of a kiss. Hermione held it for as long as she could, warm lips locked, tongues duelling until they were both short of breath. Hermione gave up, Bellatrix was going away from her again, she didn’t care if it was in full sight of everyone, let them deal with it, let the world know they were an item.</p><p>Like Cissy said, Bellatrix needed all the help she could get. And Hermione had something of an inkling about where this conversation was going, and she needed to distract herself from it, to forget about where it might lead, for as long as possible.</p><p>Bellatrix pulled away, and tipped a salute with the baton. “Keep buttering me up like this, Cissy, and I’ll take fucking Madrid for you. El Ferrol it is!” She spun around to face the Floo, and walked into it without hesitation. “<em>Whitehall.</em>”</p><p>Hermione watched her go, and managed not to cry. Then, she felt a tug on her arm, and was led into an alcove by Cissy, alone, away from the others. And Cissy followed it up by making sure of a magical silencing charm, to give them their privacy. “So, Hermione, we have a very weighty matter to discuss.”</p><p>“This is about Harry, isn’t it?” The tea she had drunk seemed to do nothing to keep her from getting a dry throat.</p><p>“It is.” Narcissa answered, taking on a grim tone. “I will be plain with you. If the Dark Lord is terrified of his resurrection, then I intend to give him something to be afraid of. After we meet with the Irish delegation, we’ll be holding a meeting that will include most of the remaining survivors of the Order and friends he had, as well as those who may provide us information on the Water of Death. It’s time to see if we can come up with a plan to bring this war to an end.”</p><p>
  <em> My friend, a pawn again… </em>
</p><p><em> ...But how else are we going to win this war? </em>Hermione jerkily nodded her head in the affirmative. She could do nothing else.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. Ferrol in Galicia is one of the few cities in the west which had its name changed for political reasons like many cities in the former Soviet Union have: From 1938 to 1982 the birthplace of Francisco Franco was formally named "El Ferrol del Caudillo". Because of this, many westerners of a certain age who are not Spanish refer to the city as "El Ferrol" instead of Ferrol.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0082"><h2>82. The Water of Death</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Hermione never failed to be impressed with Narcissa, but at this point she had come to the conclusion that anyone who failed to be impressed with Narcissa was setting themselves up for very unpleasant surprises in the future.</p><p>She had arranged for the House Elves to prepare for a full midday meal. The moving pictures on the walls reminded all that this was a magical household, but it was the first one that the Irish Government had seen. Muggles had not been allowed into the houses of Wizards before this day, not <em> this </em> kind of wizard’s house, and especially not <em> Ancient House, </em>which handily beat out Saltford Manor as the oldest private house in all of Britain.</p><p>It was also a Roman villa on a scale that few were, which had survived all the wars and dissensions since, the legacy of a family rich and powerful two thousand years before. There was a certain psychological factor in humans that simply was predisposed to being impressed by this—it was not tacky, or cheap, or anything like nouveau-rich, but rather the effortless grace of a very old family.</p><p>And Narcissa was a charming host. Understated elegance was her very nature. Hermione felt like a bit of a popinjay in her full dress uniform. Andromeda demonstrated that she could put the same show on, despite her life on the margins of both wizarding and muggle middle class society.</p><p>“Field Marshal Lady Black is already off to the Iberian Front,” Narcissa was explaining to the Taoiseach. “And yes, we were blessed to grow up here.” Whether or not that was true was immaterial, Hermione supposed; it was simply what you said.</p><p>Narcissa made a show of praying to the family shrine before leading them to table. It was all subtle, and they were mostly nominally Catholics, but it was a remind that she was from an older tradition than the English, and one of the most impressive things to Hermione was that effortless code-switching—the way Narcissa smoothly went from modern English, to presenting herself as the Prime Minister of a country of which England was very much the largest part—to the living manifestation of an ancient and pagan <em> Yr Hen Ogledd. </em></p><p>Hermione felt very much like a conscious decoration, a reminder of a united front, a friendly face. The longer she sat and listened, the more completely she realised that Narcissa <em> had them, </em>she was taking advantage of the shock of what they had seen in London. Even after years of magic, what had come in London was like the literal rising of the dead from Hell. It was instinctually terrifying. The muggles in the military probably avoided fear not merely by being hardened veterans, who were prepared to lay down their lives for others, but because they were very closely embedded with witches and wizards and had been for years. These men and women had seen them only adversarially from a certain distance up until the point of the liberation.</p><p>On that day, and for all that it felt so very distant, but it was only yesterday; yesterday, they had seen wizards and witches for their power to manipulate the world, for good or ill, and <em> just how great it was. </em>And Narcissa, hewing carefully to her line about the unity of one single people—about the realities of the fact that the Celtic nations could never untangle themselves completely from England, nor should they desire to, for the English were only Celts who a thin band of conquerors had impressed with foreign ways—was wearing down opposition to her plan. She cheerfully indulged in using Bellatrix’s defence of Galicia to her advantage, and didn’t stint in plying on the stories of heroism, and driving home the point of how their unity, and shared effort, would be the only way to defeat Voldemort, and retain civilisation in the wake of the war.</p><p>But the words never quite struck home, never quite came into focus, save a few snippets here and there. Hermione said the right things at the right times, but mostly her mind was fixed on one thing—her oldest and dearest dead friend—Harry Potter.</p><p>On the evening meeting that would come <em> after </em>Narcissa’s master-class in diplomacy, and probably require just as much, or more diplomacy as this had. And Hermione really was dreadfully uncomfortable about it. She didn’t know what to think, what to feel, what to say, about the meeting where they would discuss trying to bring Harry back from the dead, after more than six years.</p><p>She had seen the list of attendees.</p><p>Molly and Ron Weasley were on it.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Evening would come soon enough, and for Hermione’s soul… There was no way that could feel fast. So she did anything she could to kill time. After the House Elves had completed their rearrangements, Narcissa moved into the Tablinum, which had last been occupied by her father as an office (and probably every other Lord and Lady Black since the 1400s, and with a brief gap, right back until the house was built). Hermione, for her part—her mind clouded—headed out onto the land for a walk. Bellatrix had worked her into the wards—they treated her like family.</p><p>They weren’t officially married yet, but Bellatrix had already uncomplicatedly treated her like family, in ways that had meaning and power. She hadn’t mentioned it, or made a big deal about it. She had just <em>done it. </em>And, to Hermione, it meant much more that way. She could ramble through the whole extent of the Black Estate without a care.</p><p>And she needed it. <em>Gods, </em>she needed it. The summer sun beat down, so she wore her uniform cap, a reminder of all that had come to pass, but a reminder of good times just as well as bad. When the bitter winds howled across the steppe, what a feat had it been, when she charged forth with Bella, and served as her Chief of Staff as she shattered Armies that all told amounted to a million men in the field against the CIS? A feat she’d never imagined, never even thought to imagine, that had demanded every effort from both intellect and body, until they were strung out, down to the bone.</p><p>Even the storms in spring, the terrible three sisters waves, seemed like a feat to be proud of. Without fear, they had stormed and liberated Britain. She remembered thinking about poor King Harald, and how at least he had the supreme pleasure of liberating his homeland even as he died. Well, she had managed the same feat—at Bella’s side.</p><p>Pausing in the sun, a little tremble of emotion went through her. She had read Tolkien, <em>of course </em>she had read Tolkien, like most creative and imaginative children. Of course, not as many of them read the <em>Silmarillion, </em>but Hermione had. She was struck with the thought now that even if they could not kill the Dark Lord, if they could not crush and stop Voldemort, that they had wounded him, they had imitated Fingolfin’s attack on Angbad. Bettered it, even. She started to laugh, and laugh, and laugh, alone in the woods. “<em>Slowly in fear, the Dark Lord appears…</em>”</p><p>Even if they all died now, they had humiliated Voldemort, and taken his homeland from him, in the hour when he thought his triumph over Britain was complete and absolute, utter and eternal. They had done more than kill him, they had wounded him, they had humiliated him.</p><p>Her laughter gently pattered away, like release from the intensity, the pain and the uncertainty. What would she do if this worked? She’d be there for Harry, in every way she could. But when he questioned her relationship with Bellatrix, and that was certainly inevitable, she’d show her memories to him, and show all they had done and shared, and hope that their friendship still had a place. If it didn’t, she’d do her duty by her friend, even if he didn’t consider her one anymore.</p><p>But, this wasn’t a choice to be undone. <em>Hermione Granger of the House of Black. </em></p><p>Really, she was more afraid of facing Ron and Molly Weasley than she was of that, at this point. So many people had used and abused Harry. Dumbledore had set him up. Hermione saw her mission as pretty clear: If he came back to them, she would, absolutely, positively, and without a doubt, give him the right, the power, the privilege of being his own man. If he never forgave her for the choices she made, she would accept it.</p><p>She wasn’t sure the resolution or the confidence would hold in practice. It was still a hypothetical and it was easy to think big about hypotheticals. But she resolved to at least try. She would do right by her friend, and if it ended… It would still be her obligation to keep doing right. Firm-fixed in her mind, she wandered back toward Ancient House, wondering what the response of the others would be, more afraid of Molly and Ron than of the ‘hypothetical’ she had just thought over. They had suffered all the parts of the war, all the cruel indignities, all the way it taught ruthlessness, in a way that Harry had been spared. Hermione had perhaps only <em>made it work </em>with Bellatrix, as opposed to getting into a profoundly unhealthy relationship (ignoring those who would still call it unhealthy, including those she was about to face), because of that harshness, that had burned away the girlish innocence forever. But for someone else without her particular circumstances it might have well made them into an implacable enemy of Bellatrix Black.</p><p>And of course, Ron had his own reasons to take it especially badly. Hermione sucked in her breath, held a grimace on her face. By the time she reached Ancient House, the resolution, the good feelings, the confidence that she could ‘do right by’ Harry and that’s what really mattered, the entire ridiculous hypothetical scenario when they didn’t even have the Water of Death yet, all of it had gently melted away, leaving her just as anxious as she had been before. She was only sure it would work out in her daydreams, and that was the only place anything could ever be sure.</p><p>The Atrium was being prepared for an informal evening reception when she returned. The guests would start arriving within half an hour, and Hermione decided to put on her field uniform, to be the Russian Officer, not the old friend. The armour of a professional at least held at bay the doubt and self-recrimination that once again set in as soon as she had returned, and she she would just have to settle down and run with that as long as she could. They were all sitting down, after all, to try and have a calm and reasonable planning session about how to resurrect Harry, as if you just, every day, brewed a pot of tea, and sat down, and planned out how to bring back to life a friend six years dead.</p><p>Well, that was what the world had come to.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>When Ron walked in with his mother, Hermione, who until that moment had remained reasonably in control of herself, froze in place. She watched them, and she felt Ron’s eyes on her, dressed in uniform, looking so, so grim.</p><p>Narcissa stepped and interposed herself with a polite gesture of acknowledgment. “Madame Weasley. Councillor Weasley. Please sit, and avail yourselves of the refreshments.”</p><p>“Thank you,” Molly answered, looking around and seeming for a moment nonplussed. They had to have some idea of what the meeting was about, after all, and coming to Ancient House, which no Weasley had been invited to in centuries (except Ginny and only very recently) must have been almost disconcerting.</p><p>“I’m not sure we’ll want any refreshments,” Ron muttered, but moved to sit.</p><p>Narcissa was quite professionally unperturbed, as Hermione moved to sit with her. Soon enough, Ginny, Luna, Nymphadora and Andy also all arrived, as well as Charlie Weasley, whose arrival with reinforcements at the Battle of Hogwarts had nearly defeated Voldemort despite Harry’s death—Hermione hadn’t seen him since their escape from Britain, and six years wiser and more learned in history, she now couldn’t help but compare the tragic last moment when it seemed like they would win to the legendary Orre’s Storm at Stamford Bridge. He was a very sombre man now, aged past his years.</p><p>Flitwick arrived, and then that was all of them. “Your Grace,” he observed with perhaps some bemusement, looking at Narcissa sitting on one of the chairs that were casually arranged in the Atrium. The elves were serving tea, seamlessly and invisibly.</p><p>But it was Andromeda who started to speak. “Witches and wizards… We are here to discuss a delicate matter. First of all, I must warn you that this conversation is covered under the Official Secrets Act. If any of the information in this meeting is discussed with any person not invited, for any purpose whatsoever, without the express written permission of the Prime Minister, personally, you will be prosecuted according to the Defence of the Realm Act of 2004,” she began, acknowledging the enabling legislation for the wide-ranging Emergency Powers that Narcissa’s Government presently had. “In a Civilian Court, or Military Court, or by Attainder, according to the preference of the appropriate Government officers. Now, with that formality gone,” Andy seemed a bit bemused that Charlie Weasley managed to stiffen up with a classic bit of the Weasley surprise at something so serious—but ‘Strelkov’ was another matter entirely… “I am referring, of course, to … A concept, a power, that in the common wisdom of the British Wizarding Community is impossible, but common wisdom in the Russian would say <em>is </em>possible, with one source. If I may introduce Lady Larissa Sergeivna Naryshkina?” She gestured, and Larissa entered, alone.</p><p><a id="firstHeading" name="firstHeading"></a>Draco had decided it would be best to stay away from this meeting. Hermione suspected he was right. As the woman who would someday be her stepmother, Narcissa rose and helped her to sit. Before this point, Hermione had never seen Larissa dressed like this, in the tasselled cloak of a Russian witch, wearing a Kokoshnik. As a sign of power and responsibility, adult Russian wizarding women wore them whether or not they were married. It was with a collected dignity that Larissa sat.</p><p>“How many of you,” she began without preamble, “know of the tale of Koschei the Deathless?”</p><p>“Well, I know that for someone who’s supposedly deathless, he’s very dead,” Ron quipped, and tossed a sharp glance at Hermione.</p><p>Larissa frowned, blue eyes glinting. “Yes, he is. But not for the want of trying. He had the Water of Life, to cure his body of ills and grant him youth and beauty, as long as it lasted. But it was not a proof against the death given to him by Ivan Tsarevitch and Marya Morevna. Other tales say the Water of Life could grant life, even to one whose head was severed from their body.”</p><p>Ginny winced and began to softly weep, trying to keep herself together. Molly reached out and gently wrapped an arm around her. Hermione sucked in her breath and trembled, and Ron was still. This time, she met his eyes, and nodded once. <em> Before Voldemort buried him, he mutilated him, to make it unbearable for you, </em>she thought back to the words Bellatrix had used, in the intensity of her emotion not quite exact, when they had been at Hogwarts.</p><p>Ron stiffened, face going so cold, a cold she had never seen on his face before the Battle of Hogwarts, never imagined seeing on it. The look which had come to predominate, after Chisinau.</p><p>“Well, it’s not quite true,” Larissa continued, after allowing for the pause. “The Water of Life will do nothing to heal a decayed body. It is the Water of <em> Life. </em>Its magical remit, if you will, is the living world, and living things, and granting and maintaining and nurturing life. Where decay has set in, the world of death, it has no power.”</p><p>“So, the Water of Death,” Hermione found herself speaking up, whispering in a hushed tone, as if the very concept held power, and wondering if, perhaps, it did.</p><p>“The Water of Death,” Larissa agreed. The shadows were growing long outside, and over the hot cups of smokey tea, the world felt mysterious, powerful with magic in this place. She looked up to the sky, thought about the hill on the Black Estate, the one with the Standing Stones. Thought about the origin of the name, that the House had been the Keepers of Black Water—<em> bog men, </em>she thought, darkly, and imagined days when earlier Bellatrixes, two thousand years before, lived by a code far more ancient than any morality of their age, and sacrificed men in bogs, for power in the murky black water of death.</p><p>This was not the kind of magic that Dumbledore’s Hogwarts had taught. This was…</p><p>“The Water of Death,” Larissa continued calmly, reciting facts she had no doubt learned in the Black Court of Koldovstoretz, “The Water of Death kills. To drink it, you will instantly die—it is like an Avada Kedavra spill made into a liquid potion. You can’t tell it apart from normal water, or the Water of Life, for that matter. But when applied to a corpse, a dead person? It binds the parts of their body back together, and heals their physical form, to the perfect whole shape of a person who died just a moment before, peacefully, or of the Killing Curse, without a mark. From <em> This </em>state, one in which every imperfection of decay has been removed by the Water of Death, the Water of Life will indeed bring someone back to life who has once been dead. Because of this, as many people have sought the Water of Death as the Water of Life—but it is held by --”</p><p>Luna looked up with a bright smile. “Oh, dear, Larissa, someone shall be questing to find the hut on chicken legs, then, shall they not?”</p><p>Larissa and Andromeda exchanged a glance, and Larissa nodded comfortably at Luna. “Indeed, Miss Lovegood. And as it happens, I do know someone who has more information than I do.”</p><p>Hermione couldn’t help it, despite how stressed and uncomfortable the meeting was, she smiled. “Master Flyorov.”</p><p>“Yes,” Larissa agreed. “I have sent for him, by Floo, portkey, and Floo. If we receive permission to proceed.”</p><p>“Permission to proceed?” Ron blinked. “We’re talkin’ about bringing Harry back, right? Why would we need permission? Is this about N—the Prime Minister? Is it about Crazy Lestrange?”</p><p>Hermione winced and felt a flush of anger hot at her cheeks.</p><p>“<em>Permission from all of you,</em>” Andy intervened hastily. “From all of us. Larissa excluded. This is… Gods know what the afterlife is like, and which one he has experienced, though we all believe it must be a very, very good one. He is a brave young man. Was a brave young man. But he was cruelly manipulated throughout his life.”</p><p>Flitwick grimaced. “I never did like what Dumbledore was up to there,” he muttered, then, spoke louder, “Ron Weasley, we don’t know how painful or disconcerting it will be him to return from beyond, if we can find the Water of Death, if everything works as advertised.”</p><p>“It will,” Larissa insisted over her tea.</p><p>“Be that as it may, Lady Larissa,” Flitwick continued. “It’s a grave matter, and…” He trailed off, looked to Andy.</p><p>“Harry never got a choice about anything in his life,” the middle Black sister finished with a nod. “Now we’re all sitting here, and we’re going to choose for him. Again. Because the world leaves us with no choice, ourselves.”</p><p>“If the world leaves us with no choice then we know what we have to do,” Charlie whispered, and looked to his mother, whose expression was frozen in thought.</p><p>But Luna just smiled. “Well, I think it’s lovely. I can’t wait—I haven’t been able to wait to see Harry again for <em> years. </em>”</p><p>Hermione wondered morbidly if Luna was talking about seeing Harry in the afterlife by dying herself, or if she had always expected him to be resurrected. She didn’t want to know which.</p><p>Tonks grimaced and folded her legs very precisely, like she was a little afraid that she might fall out of her chair. “The prophecy says he’ll kill Voldemort. We need a dead Voldemort. So we bring him back. How does it actually work? Voldemort is surrounded by an Army of a Million Men, and he’s less than a hundred miles from the Door of a Billion Stars.”</p><p>“A billion stars?” Molly glanced back to her. “I’m never expecting you to be this cryptic, Andromeda.”</p><p>“The portal of horror,” Hermione thrust herself up, and stepped behind the chair to grab onto the back, for support. “There is a creature, among the stars, which swallows planets—I saw it, I felt it… A hunger for the essence of a soul. Azi Dahaka, the Lord of Ten Thousand Serpents… I participated in the Priestesshood, in ancient times, in dreams. Larissa had a similar experience. So did Bellatrix…”</p><p>Ron glared, but his older brother kicked his shin with his boot, and he held his tongue.</p><p>“So… It is a dire threat and I think it has something to do with the way that Voldemort managed to raise the dead in London. And he’s <em> very close </em> to this portal, and we don’t know what kind of power he might gain, or what kind of threat he might unleash, when he reaches it. So he must be stopped, not only for that, but also because the Water of Life is found only on the top of the very same mountain, Life on the top, Death on the Bottom at the Door, you see,” Hermione continued, her voice almost stuttering with the urgency she felt in explaining it. “If he seizes Ararat, he gains both the Door, and cuts off our access to the Water of Life. And he’s so close, and it’s unlikely he’ll run out of ammunition and troops, despite the reverses we’ve inflicted upon him, until <em> after </em>he’s obtained his objective.”</p><p>“Who <em> doesn’t </em> want Harry to come back?” Ron asked. “ <em> Bellatrix? </em>”</p><p>Hermione shot him a look. “Nobody doesn’t want Harry to come back. But Tonks is asking a very valid question. We can’t just—hand him a wand, and tell him, ‘all right, back in the saddle lad, go up to Voldemort and challenge him to a duel’. For starters, we know there’s one horcrux left—Nagini!”</p><p>“Then bring him back,” Molly spoke, “and I’ll be his mother, and if we can’t find a way for him to take on Voldemort, then he <em> won’t. </em>But he will be alive.” She directed a look at Narcissa. “This meeting had a foregone conclusion, didn’t it? You just wanted us to feel comfortable with it.”</p><p>“How Slytherin of you, Misses Weasley,” Narcissa acknowledged, and raised her teacup. “Tonks, do you have any objection?”</p><p>Tonks shook her head. “No. Not to that. We just have to properly plan this, so we’re not throwing him unready into a meat-grinder, just like … Just like Dumbledore did, before the war escalated. Like we all did, I guess. Still feel guilty about that.”</p><p>“I’m not Albus Dumbledore,” Narcissa answered, very softly, and very coldly.</p><p>“No, you’re Draco Malfoy’s mother…” Ron muttered.</p><p>Narcissa shot him a look. “If you don’t believe me to have the slightest bit of compassion for the boy, then at least please consider that I am competent enough to make sure that the prophesied man who will defeat the Dark Lord is properly surrounded by dozens of witches and wizards, thousands of troops with the best weapons, the finest regular intelligence briefings and every magic charm that can be made to help; with entire Front Armies laying down their lives as a distraction for his mission. As I said. <em> I am not Albus Dumbledore. </em>Now, are there any more questions or objections?”</p><p>“No? Good.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0083"><h2>83. No Going Back</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>As the meeting ended, Hermione very seriously considered apparating to London to escape the Weasleys. She wanted to be anywhere other than to face any of them at the moment, except for Ginny, who had stubbornly remained her friend. But, Ginny and Hermione had been in combat together for several years; they had a bond that she had come to lack with the rest of the family.</p><p>She wanted to get away, but she couldn’t. Made she didn’t completely want to get away; she felt well-disposed toward all of them, still. There was a perverse part of her (or the decent part? Gods only knew) that wanted this confrontation. She didn’t try nearly as hard as she could have.</p><p>Ron obliged. As they began to drift away in the late evening, there he was, following her down the hallway. She paused, and turned. “Ron. There’s something you want to talk about?”</p><p>“<em>Something. </em>Don’t play coy with me.” He approached straight up to her, and from the first moment, Hermione regretted not immediately using her wand to escape, even in front of everyone. A hasty wave and a ‘Ta’, and take advantage of wards keyed to her and no-one else outside of the family to leave without taking the Floo.</p><p>Instead, she was standing there. <em> Fuck you, </em>she thought to herself, looking up. There was a real element of threat. They were both fit soldiers, and he had the advantage on her in muscle, by far. There was always an element of threat when someone had your back to the wall, but especially, as a woman, your ex. She loved Ron to death even as she had been unable to stand what he did, even as it wasn’t the kind of love that meant their relationship could ever work. Ever be anything other than a convenient fiction, held together for the reporters, in another time, another place, another future where she was running to be the next Minister of Magic.</p><p>All of that was true, but it didn’t matter. In the end, being a woman backed into a corner by a man was scary. And with her experience on the front, it set her adrenaline rushing, she wanted to fight even though she didn’t want to fight <em> him. </em>She forced herself to close her eyes, to sigh, to try to calm down.</p><p>He put a hand on her shoulder, and she froze. Her eyes blinked open—he was standing there, with a mix of love and anger on his face. “God, Hermione, what did she do to you?”</p><p>Hermione blinked.</p><p>“I heard your screams. Harry heard your screams. We thought … What she carved into your arm. Torture. But was it rape, too? Is that how all of this started?”</p><p>“<em>It is not how all of this started,</em>” Hermione answered, feeling her breath freeze, her body, her skin go cold, the fury start to build that once again, someone had made the assumption that Bellatrix had raped her. <em> I’m my own damned woman and I make my own choices! </em> “I’m a lesbian, and I came to this relationship quite voluntarily. I’m sorry, but we would have never worked, we would have been unhappy, it would have all been a lie. I won’t pretend to provide a satisfactory explanation of how I fell in love with Bellatrix, but I did.”</p><p>He pulled his hand back. “The woman who tortured you. I would have done anything to kill her in that hour, anything to save you. But … You were happy with her?”</p><p>“Of course not!”</p><p>“But you’re with her now..”</p><p>“It’s not the same. There’s attraction, there’s always been attraction, but being with her during the Crimean operation, tore it open like a raging torrent. I couldn’t resist, and I didn’t want to resist, and I wanted to be with a woman like her whose exact response about every convention in the world is to not give a fuck about them, Ron. We’re so close and so far apart—so much alike in intelligence and talent and ambition and so far apart in how we approach the world. And she’s suffered so much…”</p><p>“Yes, yes, Azkaban is a moral crime. No doubt. I could lecture you about what I’ve seen on assignment in Europe, but I’m not going to be so churlish as to say that you don’t understand what our enemy does. She tortured you. Her allies tortured her sister, Andromeda, and murdered her husband. I’m sure they still speak because they’re blood family. I don’t hold that against Misses Tonks at all. But you, Hermione?” He turned away, and then quickly turned back. “Damnit. You’re the most spectacular woman in the world. She’s a <em> monster. </em> I loved you and to this day, I think I scarcely deserved you. I’m not at all as intelligent as you are. I’ve succeeded only thanks to a desperate cunning and the fact I’m willing to do anything and anything at all to avenge Harry, do you understand?” He leaned closer, an expression that was thuggish, and dangerous again. “ <em> Anything. At. All. </em> He was my friend. And he was your’s too.”</p><p>“And I talk to him when I’m alone! I smoke and I beg. I try to understand,” she cried, the tears now falling hot and sharp from her cheeks.</p><p>“So you made love to Bellatrix, the woman who killed Sirius Black? Harry’s Godfather…” He paused, and then sneered. “Damnit, Hermione. Forget Sirius a moment. What about Dobby?”</p><p>Hermione tried to swallow, tried to swallow again, like she were choking on air. Had to force one of her hands up to her throat, hold it in place, to help herself swallow, to clear her throat, her skin pale as a sheet, the tears still falling from her eyes, but now silently. “He deserved better. But you know, that dagger meant that Bellatrix treated him like a dangerous enemy combatant—a foe worthy of respect—not a slave, not a mere house-elf. She’s always been good to her elves, respectful to them, and…”</p><p>“<em>IT WAS JUST WAR?!” </em> Ron erupted, screaming. “That’s what the excuse is going to be today, Hermione Granger? ‘<em>Oh Well, it was just war’. </em> Neville? War! Dobby? War! Sirius? War! Can I remind you that at the time she committed all three of those acts she was a <em> fucking terrorist, </em>and when she commanded Armies for Voldemort, she ignored the laws of War, on his order?! Can I remind you of that!?”</p><p>He shook his head in confused disgust. “What I’d give to understand it all. When you said what you said after Chisinau. Hermione, I killed those people to try and clear the way for a government which could rally and fight Voldemort. They were traitors and the families of traitors. I did what I had to. All of them were just as guilty as a Death Eater. As Bellatrix. Don’t fucking cry, lay in your own bed, damnit. I don’t feel a single pang of sympathy about this, you deserved to hear it all.”</p><p>“You know what,” he continued, laying into her until she felt like she was eleven again. “It’s just power, that’s what it is. You’re a power-hungry bint, you always have been. You’re attracted to it, and Bellatrix has got that in spades, magical, social, political. Powerful family. You’d probably go after Narcissa if her monster of a sister wasn’t around, and I guess I’d forgive that, just a little. I was just going to be a fucking bonnet ornament for you. ‘Look, Hermione Granger has got a man from a pureblood family, so vote Granger in the upcoming election, she has a stable, normal relationship so you can trust her with the Ministry,’” he wheedled and mocked. “Thank God you broke up with me! I take it back, I don’t miss you at all, you’re <em> revolting</em>!”</p><p>“I wanted to know what it was like. I was afraid to die. I thought I was going to die without a woman in my life,” Hermione answered, feeling stiff and frozen from head to toe. “I never thought it would lead to this, but she was so tender and compassionate and passionate and skilled in bed—I thought it would be one night, and then I’d be dead… One night so I at least wouldn’t die without knowing a woman … One desperate night. But yes, I wondered about those thighs from the night in Malfoy Manor. I couldn’t help it. I don’t know why but I couldn’t. But now I regret nothing. There are beautiful depths in her soul, that were led astray by your awful, prudish world. She fought for her dark paradise where wizarding-kind could be free. It was Hell, and yes, she’s a criminal and has committed horrible crimes, she walked down into the depths of Hell, but she started out with the best intentions. And she clawed her way back out, of her own volition, for the best of intentions too: For the sake of her daughter and her family. Our family, now. I am Delphini Black’s second mother, and we’re going to make it formal.”</p><p>He jerked. “And you’re going to tell Harry that? You’re going to tell him <em> all </em>of that? By God, Hermione, he’ll wish he was dead again.”</p><p>“And I’ll tell him about the Armies of Voldemort’s that she defeated. The people who owe their lives to her. The people in Manchester and Birmingham who thronged the streets to hail her as a liberator and a saviour. The people in London who tonight are celebrating that she saved them. The parade in Oslo. Her refusal to turn to the power within the mountain—to Azi Dahaka—to beat Dolohov and the Carrows. She almost died, because she refused that power. And that was a truly good thing. She could have taken the power to defeat Voldemort, Ron, right then and there, but at a cost worse than Voldemort. She would have become the Dark Queen of Earth, and she refused! She is NOT lost. And I love her brilliance, her creativity and the very way she approaches the world, yes, I do. I will tell Harry the truth. And if he hates me forever for it, well, I’ll still help him beat Voldemort and find a life where he can be happy, I’ve sworn that oath before the stars. But I won’t give up, I won’t turn back, and I won’t regret Bellatrix. She’s earned her place in our future!”</p><p>Ron stared at her with a face that was absolutely, absolutely expressionless. That dead look he had gained after the bitter rear-guard actions in Eastern Europe, even before Chisinau. “You don’t get to be the judge of that.”</p><p>“No, she doesn’t, but Narcissa Malfoy does,” Luna’s voice came from the end of the hall. “Ronald Weasley, step back from her right now.”</p><p>He stiffened.</p><p>“Now.”</p><p>Took one step back.</p><p>“I love Harry so much! He’s been here the entire time,” Luna’s blue eyes shone. “Your sister does, too. But we don’t get angry at Hermione, because love is a complicated thing, and it can’t be helped. Cupid just shoots that arrow, and you’re in love. You really can’t help it. And Bellatrix isn’t being cruel or unkind to her. She’s learning lessons. Let the Gods judge her when she dies, when she’s lived her full life. I think,” she added, stepping closer, eyes wide and guileless, “that you’re not wrong in a lot of what you’ve said, but while it’s true, that Hermione loves power, and is attracted to it, it’s also her burning heart—compassion, forgiveness—which makes her the friend we love. She can’t shut off one for the other, you just can’t do that. So what makes her the best of us, also made her fall in love with Bellatrix too. The best and worst of her did that, because the best and worst of her is a whole person. And if we all just are excellent to each other, we’ll push past it.”</p><p>Ron tried to open his mouth to answer, but Luna just frowned. “Also, I do believe you have a Nargle in your hair.”</p><p>“<em> Oh God, Luna…! </em>” He exclaimed…</p><p>...She flashed a little wink to Hermione, and she turned away from the scene and raced down the hallway.</p><p>“Damnit, Luna… Hermione!? Hermione! <em> HERMIONE!</em>”</p><p>She paused at the end of the hall. “We’ll meet again for Harry, to be there for him. And then we’ll let it all take its course, come what may. Sorry, Ron, but I’ve got to be true to myself.” Then she spun again, and apparated straight away to Diagon Alley without another pause. There was only one thought on her mind, come hell or high water, she wanted Bellatrix, she wanted to be with her, to talk with her, right that very night. If Bellatrix had taken a portkey to Galicia to take command of the Front, than so she could. She wanted nothing more than to be simply a thousand miles from Ron Weasley.</p><p> </p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>Hermione wanted nothing more than to be with Bellatrix. There was a part of her that felt absolutely terrible about this—that the response to a conversation about Bellatrix, about how absolutely awful Bellatrix was, had ended in her running off to <em>be with Bellatrix. </em>But that was exactly what she needed, she needed her lover and she needed her without another thought.</p><p>She took the international portkey to Ferrol. With its spacious port, it was serving as the effective capital, seeing that A Coruña had been hit by a nuke. In full uniform, there was no problem with it, her credentials as an aide to General Black carried enormous weight, and it was in the middle of the night. Seeing so many muggles at the Ministry waiting for their own portkey trips were astonishing, but they were almost all high-priority officers and couriers. She was unique in not having a duffel or backpack, but nobody commented on it.</p><p>A moment later, she was acknowledged with a salute by one of the officers of the Galician Government’s <em>Guardia Civil. </em>“Colonel, Your Documents?” He asked in accented, but passable English, a thin man with a sharp little moustache greying at the tips, who looked as worn down by the years as Hermione felt—well, the war had gone on a long time.</p><p>She handed them over. “I’m going to General Black’s headquarters.” They hadn’t gazetted the promotion yet.</p><p>“You’ll want the Floo to Ourense, then.” He confirmed the documents, and saluted again as he handed them back. “Good luck, Colonel.” He had no idea what she was there for; and of course, that was for the best.</p><p>“Thank you,” and Hermione felt that simple exchange was worth more than anything in the world at that moment, it felt normal, and she desperately wanted normal… <em>Since when did being with Bellatrix feel normal? </em>It had just started, at some point.</p><p>At some point she’d gotten comfortable. “Ourense Station House,” she directed into the flames with a sprinkle of Floo powder, just a minute later. And then it would be: “Councillor of Witchcraft Hermione Granger, for General Black.” She was given a quick set of directions by a harried junior officer, and started off at once.</p><p>She walked across the Roman bridge, the Ponte Vella. The city was dark and medieval, lit by a limited number of oil and magical lamps and candles—and in spaces, the bright harsh lights run off of military portable generator sets provided a sharp contrast. There was a light rain, but her coat and hat easily pushed it aside. The city was on the Portuguese Way of St. James, and famous for its baths, but beyond that, Hermione knew nothing of it. There was a sound of artillery engaged somewhere to the east, close to the frontier with Leon, but she ignored it, until the sharp whoosh of rocket-fire south, from the direction of Chaves, made her head briefly jerk. Then she shrugged. They were in combat on two fronts, that was obvious, but the fire was from at least thirty miles distant. It was nothing to worry about right now.</p><p>Her directions took her to the Plaza Mayor in the Old City. It was a good long walk, up and under the eaves of the old Romanesque Cathedral. Even though it was nothing like the route marches she had done before, it left her strung out, but not in an unpleasant way, not completely, because it meant she was almost to Bellatrix. Her exhaustion was emotional, more than anything else. The square was not exactly square, and the Town Hall beckoned in front of her, Bella’s headquarters. She stepped in, to find the familiar sights: Map-tables, radios spread in unusual places, the pots of tea and coffee in almost infinite quantities, all of it brewed strong to stretch every bit of blackness out of possibly bad ingredients, the officers conferring. She could no longer hear the artillery, but there was a little vibration in the glass of the window, she swore, as she was saluted by the guards, and once again went through the ritual of providing her ID.</p><p>“You’re expected, Colonel. The Lady General is in the Mayor’s office.”</p><p><em>I’m expected? </em> She felt a surge of love and affection from those words, so intense it made her tremble. <em>How…? </em>But she didn’t care, she acknowledged the salute, hat firmly set under her left arm, and climbed up a narrow old stair to the office that looked out over the Plaza Mayor.</p><p>And there was Bellatrix, wearing her uniform now as if it were a point of pride, though with the same features, the magical armour of the dragonhide corset, the hair which always wanted to escape, so much like her own had begun, laughing at the tight bun that she tried to keep it in, frizzy and kinky and in abject defiance, utter impossibility of forming a pony tail like that of Larissa or Ginny.</p><p>Bellatrix was talking on the phone. “Move the 24<sup> th </sup> Field Artillery up to A Rúa with the utmost speed, Brigadier. I want them giving fires on the positions along the Sierra da Lastra by morning.” She held up a black-gloved finger, and winked to Hermione, as if to ask for only a moment. It filled the younger witch’s heart with need, and guilt.</p><p>The promised minute passed by, and the receiver clattered down. Hermione supposed that the idea of Bellatrix being gentle with muggle devices was so silly as to be pointless.</p><p>“Bella,” she whispered.</p><p>“Hermione.” Bellatrix rose to her feet. “Narcissa told me what was going to happen tonight, in a sealed message to only be opened when I was here, responsible for the front. I had them prepare quarters for you next to mine.”</p><p>“We might as well just openly sleep in the same bed,” Hermione laughed bitterly. “Ron found out. I suppose I wasn’t crediting any of his intelligence to think that he wouldn’t, but … Sometimes I guess…”</p><p>“Smart people put a lot of effort into creating convincing lies for themselves?” Bellatrix asked so smoothly. “To be honest, I think I have some experience with that myself, dear.”</p><p>“You do,” Hermione acknowledged with a wry smile, and stepped around the desk. Bellatrix was looking up to her. She’d <em> never </em> really process how a person so much larger than life had to <em> look up </em>to her. “Are you… Am I quite alright?”</p><p>“Neither of us,” Bellatrix laughed. “But it can’t be helped. We are what we are. Why – why bother with understanding how passion happens?”</p><p>Hermione laughed, and shook her head. “I thought that it would be a short war, fought for right, confined to the magical world, in the name of goodness and justice.”</p><p>“We all feel that way in the beginning, Hermione.” Bellatrix shook her head, her laugh, a soft, quiet thing, still bubbling up. Outside, the night was disturbed by a sudden volcano of fire, as a battalion of Smerch rocket launchers opened up at very long range from nearby. The light of the burning columns of flame from the rocket motors briefly eclipsed the moon, and glinted in hues of orange and white through the glass. Bellatrix grinned, almost involuntarily from the shock of the sound, responding to delight with something that would make others flinch. She took the last step forward, and embraced Hermione. “I love you. In a world like this, does anything else matter?”</p><p>Hermione kissed her with a furious intensity. She wanted to say that other things did, but she just couldn’t bring herself to believe it anymore, she couldn’t bring herself to voice the words. She felt warmth and love and need and passion and desire all bound up in this short and dark-haired woman who had once tortured her, and then fought half the world at her side. Their tongues met, their lips pressed, Hermione felt an incredible hunger, an incredible need for her, and Bellatrix was willing, was wilful, her tongue duelling and dancing, her eyes closing in pleased delight.</p><p><em> I’ve damned well made my choice, </em>Hermione thought to herself, and pulled back just enough to free her lips, with a smile on them to reassure Bellatrix. Responsibility was bred into her just as strongly as the love she now felt. “Benjamarious is your second on the Front, isn’t he? You should tell him you’re turning in for the night.”</p><p>“I will.” Bellatrix grinned in dark delight, and spun out from Hermione’s embrace to head to the door. “I’m not going to get enough sleep toonight,” she sing-songed in that girlish way she sometimes did, “and I’m perfectly happy with that.”</p><p>She leaned out into the hall. “Tarrant, you have the watch! I’m turning in!”</p><p>“Thank God, Your Ladyship. You need it.”</p><p>Bellatrix, naturally, cackled in response. She hustled Hermione across the hall, and spun around like she was going to dance, laughing. “The baths are just as good as they are at Ancient House, the Albariño vintages are utterly amazing, the architecture is beautiful, the scenery is charming, and we’re being pinched by two corps from the south and the east, so there’s plenty of fighting to be done. And now I have you with me. What a delightful Iberian holiday.”</p><p><em> You’re mad, </em>Hermione thought. But she’d known that going into the affair. And so with no further reflection at all, she stepped forward, and kissed Bellatrix again, and this time, she didn’t put her down. The guilt was smothered. She was Hermione Granger Black, and there was no going back.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>1. "Plaza Mayor" translates to "Main Square."<br/>2. Albariño is a vintage of Galician white, somewhat related to the Portuguese Vinho Verde.<br/>3. "Gazetted" refers to the practice of making official government acts by publication in The London Gazette, the official newspaper of HM Government. So it's a verb referring to the act of making a promotion official, in this case. Narcissa has promoted her sister, but it isn't official until it's been "gazetted".<br/>4. The Way of St. James is the great pilgrimage route of medieval Christendom to see the remains of St. James the Great in Santiago de Compostela.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0084"><h2>84. Secret Treaties</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b> Secret Treaties<br/></b>
</p><p>The terrible secret was that she had been thinking about it from the moment she left Britain. It came in a state of anger, as she left Ancient House, this flash of a thought, an idea that was growing inside of her. There definitely never had been any doubt of where she would go. Maybe she had <em> thought </em>there might be, when Ron approached her, but up to the moment that Luna arrived – it had made her cry but it also hardened her resolve.</p><p>She felt miserable about it, felt miserable about her choices, yet they were not shaken, she didn’t doubt they were right for her. The longer she resolved not to revisit them, not to think twice, to make this irrevocable, the stronger she became. She had walked through Ourense in the light summer rain, and steadily the conviction had grown.</p><p>She had been greeted by Bellatrix, reassured, kissed. They had made love. That left her unshakably strengthened in her conviction. In fact, there was also one course forward, one thing to do. She wanted nothing to command her, this was her liberty, her freedom, her choice. If she followed anyone, or assented to any social expectation, it would be by her own damned choice.</p><p>Hermione had drifted off in Bella’s arms, with that thought refusing to leave her head. The crazy resolution of someone voting to burn the boats and conquer or die—crossing the line in the sand, casting the die on the Rubicon. They were all on the same side, they were all fighting for the same cause. It would not be false to who she was. Not be false to her promises and loyalties.</p><p>Her sleep was a wild miasma of mixed dreams and messages. Harry, Ron, Misses Weasley, Narcissa, Andromeda—Bellatrix, Bellatrix, Bellatrix… Delphini, Larissa, Draco. Family found. Her own parents—looking like ghosts from a picture over her shoulder at her choices. What would they think? She had burned bridges before, to conquer or die. She had burned the bridge to her parents.</p><p>Hermione woke up far too early, a jolt of her body as she left the world of dreams, and entered a living world of a pleasant smell wafting through the room. Leaping up to at least sit, because all of her instincts and learned reflexes came back to her when she was on campaign and told her to be quick. Simply knowing that she was ‘in theatre’, it seemed, made it impossible for her to avoid this impulse, even when she had essentially stormed off just to spend time with Bellatrix. Spend time with her, and make it clear to everyone where her heart was.</p><p>She had left Britain to burn her boats, really, that was the real reason, and the thoughts of the night before, of that analogy, came rushing back in a storm. Did she regret it? <em> It would have been my nice if my lover wasn’t Bellatrix in some abstract way I guess, but fuck that, I love her. </em></p><p>Indeed, the thought that had seized her as she walked through Ourense the night before was still there. It hadn’t gone away, it was refusing to go anywhere. <em>Act on it. Ask her. It would be so easy. Make your commitment. Don’t let anyone shake it. </em></p><p>The fact that she woke up to an unexpected tenderness from Bellatrix only made those thoughts come back with a vengeance, and she felt consumed by the need to be just as impulsive as Bellatrix was, to reach out to Bellatrix and make it clear to her, make it clear to everyone, that she had made up her mind and there was no going back. In fact, even in the abstract, the idea that maybe someone else could have been better for her, if only things were different—it was a vapour. She didn’t want that. She wanted <em> Bellatrix, </em>and she’d have her, too.</p><p>Even as those thoughts were still fully forming, Bellatrix was there, and thrust a mug into her hands in a gesture as warm as any she’d known from her lover. “Try it.”</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>Bella refused to answer until she brought the concoction, sugar and chocolate and whiteness and a sense of that bitter kick of instant coffee, to her lips. It tasted better than it had any right to.</p><p>“A soldier’s mocha,” Bellatrix explained. “Boil the water, let some of the chocolate from an emergency ration bar dissolve, then when it’s the temperature for drinking, add your instant coffee and whitener. I’ve taken a liking.”</p><p>Hermione felt a little like she were falling in love all over again. It settled her mind and left her convinced that what she had already resolved upon—that there was no going back, that she had made her choice—was absolutely right, and that it was time to follow through with it. Follow through with it in a way just as dramatic as anything Bellatrix had done. <em> Two of us can play that game, </em> she thought with proud readiness, and with a grin and a light heart, teased her lover. “Bellatrix Black, from one of the oldest, most noble and richest families in the world, talking about the fact she’s taken a liking to mixing shelf-stable emergency chocolate, nescafe and powdered whitener in a tin cup with boiling water. Do you know you never fail to surprise me?” The thought made her wildly giddy. <em> Do it! Do it! Do it! </em>They’d talked about it before, why would it even be a surprise?</p><p>“Good, pet, that’s just how it should be,” Bellatrix swung down to sit on the bed again, with her own mug in hand. “In fact, I love this. I’ve always been honest about this. More honest than my parents, who named me Bellatrix and thought I’d be content to be some pureblood broodmare with a name like that. It seems they started lying to themselves from the moment of my nameday.”</p><p>Hermione smiled wanly, and the two leaned against each other, waking up with the hot muddy brown brew. “It strikes me now that we’ve barely talked about ourselves. There’s been too much to do. We’ve just lived in the moment, we’ve made love, we’ve cuddled, we’ve rested, we’ve fought, planned, schemed. Argued, a few times. Electric magic, you still have to start teaching me more than the barest basics and theory of that. There’s so much I want to do with you, so much for us to still explore, and … I want to do it all, Bella, I want the time to do it all in.”</p><p>“Right now. We’ll begin right this very morning. And we’ll learn as we’re doing, at the front.” Bella nodded intently, and grinned. “Aren’t you quite intent this morning?”</p><p>Hermione sighed. The ebullient mood faded for a moment. “...So, we’ll be fighting. Fair, I suppose.”</p><p>“I am the commander of the Army. Cissy would be terribly angry with me if I lost one of her divisions. Also you know I hate losing, pet.” The way she said it, a conscious mocking of the way someone might complain about losing a plate of fine china, made Hermione nearly laugh, it buoyed her after reality had briefly punctured her bubble.</p><p>So she decided to do it. Maybe it wasn’t everything, not at first, but inexorably—one thing leads to another. So she decided to ask for it. The one condition she wanted, the one simple request. The promise that would seal the deal. “Well, I’m with you for anything, forever,” Hermione answered, looking at the wall, and drawing a sharp breath. “So I guess Narcissa’s letter …”</p><p>“Yes, the plan with Harry. I’m still not sure about it. I prefer working through Nagini. Tom thinks he controls her by the fact that he can communicate with her, the only being left in the world who can communicate with her…” Bellatrix, even Bellatrix, shuddered a bit. “Such an awful fate,” she muttered. “And that would be exactly the weakness. I can’t imagine the darkness coming forth at Ararat would be good for the lake of Anahit on the top; it’s simple logic to argue that Nagini’s one chance to be restored to a human form for the rest of her life hinges on that lake. As one learns when being a Slytherin, find someone’s self-interests, that’s the lever to turn them by.”</p><p>“I don’t think anyone is neglecting your idea. It was mentioned. We just all want Harry back.”</p><p>“There’s enough people who want me dead in the world as it is,” Bellatrix answered, with somewhat more resignation as she looked at the residue at the bottom of her cup. “But I suppose one more won’t hurt.”</p><p>Hermione froze, and stared hard at the wall. It was far too raw of a reminder, and she heard Bellatrix go silent, as she realised that perhaps she had gone too far. “Bella,” Hermione at last forced herself to say, “Harry is my friend. My best friend. I will honour what that means, even if our relationship … Well, Ron came to me after the … Informational session that Narcissa held, I guess. He called me a traitor, and a power-hungry bitch. I came here, so I hope I don’t have to convince you, that I chose to stay with you, and damn the consequences.”</p><p>“You don’t.” Bellatrix was smiling, almost shyly. It was an expression that she had never seen before, as if Bellatrix were genuinely flattered by the gesture.</p><p>“But.” Hermione put her hand on Bella’s knee, and squeezed firmly. “There’s a ground-rule to this relationship, Bella. Even if my friends hate me, it doesn’t change my obligations to them as my friends. I’d lose who I am if I abandoned them. We’re going to bring Harry back, and we’re going to protect him, with our own lives, no matter what the cost is, until he completes his mission, his destiny, until the Dark Lord is dead.”</p><p>Bellatrix, now, was staring at the wall as Hermione had, frozen in place, still warm under the hand on her knee, but absolutely silent. “We,” finally escaped her lips with a soft rasp. “You said ‘we’.”</p><p>No holding back. “Yeah, I did. Consider the request to be a dowry for our wedding, I guess.”</p><p>Bellatrix jerked up, as if the words had shot electricity through her.</p><p>“Last night, I made what was possibly both the best and the worst choice of my life,” Hermione explained. “Best and worst, but absolutely no regrets. Some would say I did it completely on the cuff, and I suppose I did, but you’ve taught me the virtues of following through with things. We had agreed to be a family for Delphini already, and I’d like to make this official.” She popped a spare button from her uniform coat out, and tossed it into the air, letting it float as she brought her wand up, and transfigurated it into a simple, bronze ring. Nothing fancy, no precious metal, it was bronze and bronze it would remain.</p><p>Bellatrix stared at it tumble through the air as the spell was completed. Hermione caught it, and pressed her hands over Bella’s. Leaned in close. Held the ring to them, cupped in her hands, in Bella’s hands, a thin band of metal between warm hands, wand set aside, witch to witch. “I’ve made my choice, and Ron told me to lay in it. Well, I’m going to. First things first, I love you, I love you so much that I am never going to let you go, and live or die I’m never going to forget you. If I’m the one who makes it out, you know Delphini will be raised by an absolutely ferocious set of mothers: Me, Andromeda, and Narcissa. And if it’s you, I know that you’ll honour my memory, you’ll raise your daughter differently than you were raised, you’ll give her the chance to love a muggleborn like me, without hate. And if it’s both of us, we’re going to be happy forever, no-matter what people say about us. So I came here to make this irrevocable. I made my choice and I’m not backing down. I have decided I am brave enough to face the consequences of our love. This is what Gryffindors are supposed to do: To be brave enough to stand against convention. If the rest don’t like it, they can stuff it. Marry me, Bellatrix Black.”</p><p>Liquid pools of eyes stared up at her as the older woman processed it all in the intensity of the moment. A ghost of a smile flickered across her lips. “You said there was a condition.”</p><p>“Since we are not exactly a conventional couple, yes. Consider it a dowry,” Hermione offered. She was light-hearted, but she felt a certain seriousness also creeping through. “I have made my choice, but I will be true to myself. You must swear to me that you will protect Harry with your life. That you’ll get him through to the end with the Dark Lord, to help him to win. Especially if I’m not there to help. <em> Especially </em> if I’m not there to help. You are the most powerful witch alive, you know every move that bastard will make. You have your own plan for taking him down, despite the prophecy, which honestly sounds good enough that it might fucking work. I trust you, I love you, I believe the good in your soul is <em> there. </em> And so my condition is that you complete what I’ve chosen. I’ve chosen that even if Harry hates me, I will <em> do right by him. </em>And so my requirement for us to be engaged is that you will carry my promise for me. Either at my side, or alone. Get him through this scheme.”</p><p>“If he can come back,” Bellatrix whispered, shaking her head slowly. “If. You’re not even sure yet.”</p><p>Hermione shook one hand loose, but not the other, and pushed it against Bella’s lips. “Fate is too much of a bitch to Harry. And if they fail, well, you’ve promised me vapour. But they’re not going to fail. Fate is too much of a bitch to Harry. Promise me.” She pulled her finger back, brown eyes evidencing every bit of the intensity in her own heart, the precipice on which she dangled. <em> She isn’t going to say no after that, is she? After I’ve burned my bridges? She can’t say no! </em></p><p>“Promise. No turning back for either of us. I accept your proposal. We’ll be married, if we survive the war.” And then, Bellatrix took the ring, put it firmly on her own finger, <em> thank you very much, </em>Hermione could almost sense from inside of her mind, and leaned forward, and Hermione felt the most amazing kiss, a gentle brush as it began, pulsing with warmth in her lips as they worked closer, opening, tongue insistent. It was far too brief, but it told her everything.</p><p>“I accept.” Bellatrix took a breath. “We’ve talked about this before. We’ve planned it before. We’ve declared we’re a family before. Narcissa made it legally possible. Yes, if he comes back, yes, if he needs my help, I’ll get Harry Potter through the war. I’ll do it to humiliate my former Master, and I’ll do it for you. And I won’t let you down.” Her grey eyes, pools of darkness, held Hermione’s brown ones sharply, gazes locked. “I will do it for you. I will do it for spite. I will do it for love. And most of all, I’ll never let you down. I’ve let so many people down in my life and I’m tired of it. Everyone has a place to which they are pushed, beyond which, they are just getting done being pushed.” She squeezed Hermione’s hands hard. “I am done being pushed. We will live openly, and I won’t let you down. I swear it.”</p><p>Crying, believing her, trusting her, Hermione kissed Bella as hard as she could.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>They went out to Verin together, in the Spanish summer sun. The enemy was coming up from Portugal in the south. There were a series of open valleys, mostly bowl-shaped, in the midst of ridges braided with creeks, Medeiros to the west, and Romariz to the east.</p><p>Immediately southwest of Verin, there was a high hill overlooking the village of O Rosal. There, the Galician government troops had placed a battalion of towed 105’s, which from that commanding position had for two whole days halted the Morsmordre troops pushing up the valley of the Támega river. The smoke from the gunfire still choked the valley. It was against this advance, fronted predominantly of M47 and M48 tanks of 1950s American vintage, that the central corps reserve of Smerch launchers had been firing on the night that Hermione arrived.</p><p>As they apparated to the command post in the midst of the burning town of Verin, Hermione could look out and see the craters to the south, where the first attempt to force past O Rosal had been turned back by the massed Smerch fire. Now under copious clouds of smoke, which were probably magically generated for all that they completely filled the valley of the Támega, hanging low and thick and black in the summer sun, the rumble of the engines warned that another push was being attempted.</p><p>“General Black!”</p><p>“At ease,” she waved, and gestured to Hermione to follow. They could look out to the west, across the Támega, to see a dark column that was coming up the road, concealed by the ridges southwest of the town from view of the enemy. Bellatrix imperiously tapped her chrono. “Five minutes late, but we’ll make our due.”</p><p>Around them, the defenders were mostly using improvised second line vehicles, pickup trucks and light commercial trucks of every description, mounted with machine-guns, automatic cannon, infantry mortars, mortars made out of lengths of iron sewer pipe, and even aircraft rocket pods. However, they were well organised and dug in, with the infantry reasonably well equipped with ATGMs. The ridge north of O Rosal was obscured in the smoke, from the enemy having brought up much heavier 155’s to pound the Galician artillery into submission.</p><p>“So, when do we begin, General?” Hermione’s mouth quirked to a smile. This madness and chaos of war was where Bellatrix was in her perfect element.</p><p>“I want to make sure we get that battalion of Challies in place for the counterattack first, and that Councillor Abdulova covered the retreat of the guns properly.”</p><p>It was an audacious plan by any measure. The main thrust was coming from the east, from Leon. Their jumping-off point had been at Ponferrada. But Bellatrix had left only light covering forces, of local Galician volunteer troops like these who had been previously used for internal policing duties by the Morsmordre, equipped with small arms and improvised combat vehicles. They were motivated to fight for the autonomy of the Galician nation, but they were totally unable to offer serious resistance to fully equipped Janissary divisions.</p><p>Bellatrix had instead sent the Galician Regulars and the division of her own Black Guards which had arrived to the south, to Verin. The Galician Regulars were coming up from the west right now, with the lead brigade of Chally 2s only minutes away as they tore up the road. Her Black Guards however were following the second route to the east, 15km north. They were driving headlong along the railway toward A Gudiña, daringly driving tanks through the railway tunnels and cuts on the line, driving at high speed, single-file. It would be incredibly dangerous if they were caught in enfilade, but it Bellatrix was certain that she could smash the Ensorcelled troops coming up from Portugal and cover their southern flank before that happened. A powerful two division counterattack would slice through the comparatively light enemy forces at A Gudiña, and she’d be positioned to launch a strategic-level counterattack toward Benavente, threatening the rear of the main Army invading Galicia.</p><p>But a plan like this was frighteningly dependent on <em> not being found out. </em>The first part of that was the patrols by the Mig-31s overhead, the powerful interceptors operating with confidence out of the airbases near Ferrol. Coming in lower down in support of their look-down, shoot-down radars and high speed were groups of air-to-air equipped Tornadoes, the Russian and British forces now operating in close coordination.</p><p>The second was preventing, absolutely, any kind of effective communications from the southern force to the eastern. That’s what they were there for. Not just <em> effective </em> communications, but actively <em> wrong </em>communications.</p><p>Electric magic.</p><p>The MinKol detachment, lead by a prim Tatar woman who, were it not for the uniform, were it not for the feat just accomplished, would look like she belonged not within a hundred kilometres of a battlefield, arrived and she saluted Bellatrix. “General Black.”</p><p>“Councillor Abdulova, I presume?”</p><p>“Yes, M’lady.” She gestured behind her. “We shrank them and moved them and restored them in the positions you ordered. The gunners are off the hill, too.”</p><p>There would have never been enough time, never a chance to do it secretly, without magic, and Bellatrix remembered her feat with the tunnel in the Caucasus. She was smiling, the sun and smoke silhouetting her with that bright, dangerous grin, dragonskin corset—more of a magical cuirass—uniform, hair and coat flapping in the summer breeze. “Excellent. Councillor, take your detachment and reinforce the front battalions. When you see the tanks coming up, move over to the offensive immediately without waiting for further instruction.”</p><p>“M’lady!” With the salute acknowledged, she turned away.</p><p>Bellatrix stepped closer to Hermione, and turned to the column of tanks that was now coming into Verin and deploying through the streets of the town in readiness for the push to the south. Thanks to the work of Abdulova’s detachment, they would be supported by the 105’s firing in enfilade from the west to support the brigade in what would be a meeting engagement, an open-field general tank battle, with the attacking division from the south.</p><p>With the column came one military truck, a Kamaz, which pulled up alongside the headquarters. Bellatrix innocently waggled her eyebrows. “Here we go, Hermione,” she clapped her gloved hands together, and started back to the headquarters, and straight to the truck, where the soldiers assigned to it were carefully unloading the gear.</p><p>Analogue studio gear.</p><p>Before, Hermione had seen Bellatrix use her electric magic from her wand, in the open. She’d never seen her actually work through broadcast gear before. And today, they were going to be doing it alongside each other. To control, to manipulate the broadcasts from the enemy Army, to use their own to create a wall through which they could distort and control communications, to keep the enemy troops in A Gudiña convinced until the last that their counterparts in the south were winning, were pushing ahead… That there was no second division of the enemy free and clear to hit them from the southwest, that the Black Guards were vulnerable on their southern flank.</p><p>Generators were hauled out and set up to provide guaranteed power. Bowers were being positioned to make sure they would not run out, for as long as the operation took. Because of the bowls that the valleys formed, Bellatrix had insisted they had to be this close to the front, and precisely at Verin, to make it work.</p><p>And Hermione trusted her. The little older witch watched intently as the pelican hardcases were opened and the equipment was hauled out. She personally helped inspect it for damage and set it up, and started to direct Hermione in the same.</p><p>They were a team.</p><p>In five minutes, the set was linked to power and energized, and hooked into their radio aerials, the wires strung and tensioned between the buildings, and leads hooked into the local power grid, which was de-energised because of the fighting, anyway.</p><p>Now they energised it with a different power. Hermione looked over the muggle dials and gages and buttons and tried to image Bellatrix as a teenager sneaking off to play with them, to learn a forbidden form of magic, to understand how energy and power and the laws of arithmancy worked through the invisible waves in the air.</p><p>And there she was, in fifties but as fantastic as the finest, healthiest movie star or model. She finished giving orders to the divisional and brigade commanders and turned around toward Hermione, and clapped her gloved hands, with a look of a huntress, of genuine delight, on her face.</p><p>“Let’s do it,” she whispered, almost sensuously, almost like she were talking about something else entirely, and grinned playfully at the flush on Hermione’s face. Then she spun down into one of the folding camp chairs and reached up into a cardboard sleeve and slipped out an album.</p><p>Blue Öyster Cult’s <em> Secret Treaties. </em></p><p>Bellatrix flashed a wink to her. The mood was infectious. Britain, Harry, her friends, her choices, they were forgotten. Bellatrix pulled off her gloves, and the bronze engagement ring that Hermione had created for her was on her finger. A gold, artificial finger. Bronze over gold. Good enough for them.</p><p>Bellatrix grabbed the needle, spun the record.</p><p><em> Career of Evil, really? </em> Hermione marvelled in almost aghast wonder and a little bit of transgressive delight at the lead track. It was almost like Bellatrix was openly teasing her, completely unafraid of who she was. But wasn’t that completely true? This was Bellatrix, she <em> was </em>completely unafraid of who she was. That’s exactly what Hermione had signed up for. And it seemed to calm Bellatrix down, put her into a trance as the music from her youth, from when she still might have been the Brightest Witch of Her Age, filled the air around her as she prepared to do something truly magical.</p><p>And then blue light leapt from Bella’s fingertips into the boards and the controls, light them up, made them move without being touched, manipulated signals, even as she adjusted dials manually, and with her wand in her hair, sometimes took it down to flick a command across the heavens. The sun slipped in under the portico and tarpulin protecting them, the roar of artillery and guns echoed in the bowl of the valley as the tanks swung out to attack. The light gleamed off of her raven-black hair.</p><p>And with a gentle voice of wild delight and perfect poise, Bellatrix taught and did at the same time. She flicked her power out across the carrier waves, manipulated frequency and amplitude. She stole the voices and messages of warning, and twisted and manipulated men’s voices, magically, through the radio waves, so that when they arrived at their destinations, they were messages of reassurance, calm, even victory.</p><p>Before them, the tanks stormed forward, the artillery thundered, the MinKol wizards went over onto the attack. And slowly, Hermione joined her in causing directed chaos across the airwaves, turning the message of defeat and threat into one of victory and clear roads. The answering messages transformed from uncomprehending confidence into promises of support and readiness and wariness. And as long as the aeroplanes overhead kept their recon birds away, there would be no cause for an enemy wizard to apparate carrying a message. Each minute they held up the veil of illusion carried them inexorably closer to victory. </p><p>And they listened to <em> Secret Treaties, </em>under the Spanish sun, in the midst of war and chaos. </p><p>Just as Bellatrix liked it--perfectly in her element, blazing bright with a dark light, <em>alive </em>as almost no-one really was.</p><p>
  <em> Gods, Voldemort wasted her. </em>
</p><p>And that, Hermione would <em> never </em>do.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0085"><h2>85. The Edge of Hope</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A Gudiña. Burning, flaming ruins of tanks, trucks, troops, men. Weapons improvised and regular. Some abandoned coaching stock sat at the train station, eight tracks on a single-track main. There was a steam locomotive there, new-built, since liquid fuel was too precious for the civilian railways in the Morsmordre.</p><p>It sat, gleaming, perhaps just finished a few months before. It was untouched, whereas the town was burning. For a moment, Hermione just stared at it, like History had wended back in reverse. Then she shrugged. There were more important things to do, than worry about how the world was collapsing back to older technology, and older ways of living.</p><p>Now, there were more roads and railways together ahead toward Leon, and they pressed in. Bellatrix, jammed into the back of the command track, with her tiny size making her far too comfortable, was urgently speaking on the radio to one commander after another. A brigade was already moving north toward A Rúa to hit the enemy invading Galicia in the flank, to slow them down while the main penetration force, striking deeply into Leon to the east, would collapse the entire offensive. The rugged mountains all around were flecked with explosions, from magical and conventional means, bombs and artillery and spells.</p><p>Hermione rode with her head out of the command track, wand ready to block any attack she could see, the gunner close at hand with the 14.5mm machine gun. Things that weren’t threats, like the steam locomotive, had to be quickly forgotten and put aside. Her eye sometimes flicked wearily skyward, but with the defections it was the allied air forces that ruled the skies here (even if most of the pilots had defected only two months before). The feeling of morale was inexorable. When they had descended on A Gudiña, the enemy had been clearly surprised and demoralised, Bella’s ruse had worked, and they were buoyed by the knowledge that once again they were on the offensive.</p><p>The ridgeline ahead marked the border between Galicia and Leon. There, just west of the Leonese village of Las Hedradas, a battalion of enemy tanks were positioned, hull-down. They swung out to a stop at O Canizo, alongside the N-525 highway toward the ridge. The tanks and armoured vehicles in the column pressed ahead as the command laager was quickly set up. Hermione kept her wand fixed forward, magnifying the enemy position for a moment, and then joined Bellatrix was she dismounted in the afternoon shade of an east wall of an abandoned building.</p><p>Hermione swung down and brought up the handwritten notes marking the allocations of fighter-bombers and the availability of support. “One squadron of the 1244<sup>th</sup>, Fencers.”</p><p>“Ah good, cluster bombs,” Bellatrix nodded. “They probably rushed that battalion forward. We think it’s M60s, and maybe just M47s. Older American tanks, probably attached to a motorised division, the 14<sup>th</sup> is the best intelligence estimate. If we cut through them, we’ll get to Pueblo de Sanabria before the infantry can set up in the streets, and they won’t put up much of a fight.”</p><p>“Nobody has,” Hermione murmured as she ticked off marks on one of the maps. The world felt vital, alive, and she knew well how Bellatrix always seemed to feel about these things.</p><p>“Bad commanders left at the rear, ensorcelled troops, the dregs of captured equipment from the Armies of Europe—this is all they have left to face us here. They thought an offensive could succeed… Or they just ordered one because Riddle wanted one, and there was no consideration about whether or not it would succeed,” Bellatrix shrugged, flicking her eyes down.</p><p>“Riddle?”</p><p>“I’m comfortable enough at this point calling him by his real name. I assure you, there’s nothing left of respect for him, even though I can’t quite tell you how it was ever really possible for him to lead me, to command my respect. It seems impossible now.”</p><p>Hermione smiled tightly. She saw a little bit of hesitancy in Bellatrix. Not a lie, but perhaps fear—the prospect that breaking free might not yet be done. That Voldemort’s fearsome power, that he reminded the whole world of in London, might really be unbeatable. She understood it far too well. “Let’s just keep pushing,” she offered, and Bellatrix turned immediately back to the plan.</p><p>To her heart and soul the transformation was complete—Bellatrix was just a woman, and she was going to be her wife. And the longer they were fighting in Spain, the further away the matter of Harry and Ron was. She kept it firmly pushed to the side, and fell back into the comfortable rhythm of the staff officer on the offensive, guiding the troops in swinging out to fight yet another meeting engagement.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>They took Benavente in three days of hard fighting, and established a perimeter that pushed artillery out of the range of the town, on three sides, against counterattack on the open plains of Leon. Here again the terrible consequences of all the years of war were very well clear. There had not been electrical power in years, and people lived by candle-light, or went to bed with the sun. Automobiles had been converted to be drawn by horses or donkeys. Fields were ploughed with oxen.</p><p>There were many fresh graves from the last few years in the cemeteries. A town like Benavente had not been nuked, but with the food policies of the Morsmordre and the damage to the modern economy and modern state, many people had died of disease, the old and infirm, or a want of food to eat. To say it was medieval was to be precisely accurate. The world sometimes grimly made Hermione feel like she were watching the fall of the Roman Empire but in close-up; de-urbanisation was happening around them, and a town like Benavente was actually much better off than the ruins of some cities. She remembered the casual way that Oslo had adapted to the lack of basic goods, and shuddered—and Scandinavia had been one of the better places left, short of Russia or Britain.</p><p>Britain, by Voldemort’s design.</p><p>Here, in a world of magic and war and nuclear holocaust, the Catholic cathedral and the market-square had reassumed the places of great importance. It left Hermione struck with the sense of just how fortunate she was, to be living under Narcissa’s cool, but compassionate hand on the tiller of the ship of state. Narcissa, who even in the midst of a great retrenchment to belief and tradition driven by the war, would take the deft actions, to justify in context, and slip through laws, burning her political capital slowly for the sake of her sister’s happiness.</p><p>In that moment, thinking about how fortunate Bellatrix was to have Narcissa, Hermione wished she had a sister; she supposed she was lucky that she at least had such a good friend as Larissa. And then, with that way of random probabilities coming together just right—the absurd luck of the magical world, and the old adage of ‘speak of the devil’--she heard a familiar voice.</p><p>“’Mione!”</p><p>“Lara.” Hermione spun around, getting up from the metal fold-down desk that she occupied in the old train station. “Gods, I was just thinking about you, and there you are.” She unhesitatingly embraced her friend.</p><p>“Well, I suppose I have that talent,” she grinned. “You’ve kept yourself busy, since coming here.”</p><p>“I’ve just been making myself useful, you know.”</p><p>“I’d never expect anything less.” Larissa leaned against a column in the shade and adjusted her sunglasses. “Everything is good, ‘Mione?”</p><p>“Perfectly. Bellatrix is… At her very best.”</p><p>“I won’t ask how I should interpret that…”</p><p>The sentence had what was presumably its desired effect; Hermione immediately blushed. “No complaints for me,” she finally cleared her throat, “But if you talk about Draco in front of Bellatrix she’ll probably have you twitching on the ground in a heartbeat. Aunt, favourite nephew, you know.”</p><p>“Ah yes, the favourite nephew joke—when you only have one…”</p><p>“She really does dote on him,” Hermione answered.</p><p>“He does appreciate it, actually,” Larissa stretched. “Well, I shouldn’t share too much. He’s had a rough road. He only became brave after he learned how to have the courage to admit he was a coward. He would have been an insufferable prick before the war, I think. Instead he’s a man I can love.”</p><p>“...He was,” Hermione assured her with a bemused shake of her head, her mind flashing back through a plentiful hit reel of Draco Malfoy doing everything he could to make her life a living hell. And yet he had managed to face up to the prospect of Hermione being a relative with a certain level of dignified grace. <em>Yes, I’m pretty glad for Larissa, actually. She was in the process of killing herself doing more than one witch could to try and win this war for her country, until he showed up and forced herself to actually spend the time to heal. </em>And that mattered, to Hermione. Still…</p><p>“I assume you’re not here to listen to me spend the next few hours embarrassing Draco with tales of how he was an insufferable prick, though? Do they…” Her voice caught. “Do they want me to come back to Britain? I didn’t exactly leave on good terms with the Weasleys.”</p><p>“It’s your country and I discourage voluntary exile from it over your own choices, but I understand that you want to be with Bellatrix,” Larissa answered. “However, we were continuing to do research on the matter of the Water of Death, and Master Flyorov would like to speak with you and Bellatrix now. He is in Britain, and could come here, if there was a reasonably secure location to meet, so I volunteered to go on ahead, since it’s all information restricted to couriers, none of it can be sent by wire or owl or Floo or anything else, and scout out the present situation with the two of you for him.”</p><p>“We’ve pushed the enemy back far enough that Benavente isn’t under artillery fire,” Hermione answered immediately, going for one of her maps, feeling comfortable in that when her psyche otherwise recoiled from the prospect of talking more about Harry. She’d very nearly managed to forget the entire plan for nearly a week between Bellatrix and a war in Spain. “So. Yes, tonight, with dinner. The front is stable for the moment, the enemy is retreating and redeploying after we cut half their supply lines, they can’t send enough ammunition, food and fuel through the other half to keep an army moving forward in Galicia.”</p><p>“General Black certainly does deliver.”</p><p>“Mmmn.” Two good play this game. And, it was another distraction. “In more way than one.”</p><p>“Hermione!”</p><p>Unfortunately, it didn’t change the fact that the very same night they’d be moving forward with the plan. She turned back to her work, but paused. “Lara, they really aren’t upset with me?”</p><p>“Narcissa and Andromeda and Draco and Luna? Certainly not. You were officially on leave, after all, you had every right to travel. And you’re legally still attracted to Bellatrix’s headquarters group, so barring other orders if you were reactivated you should just be here, anyway.” Larissa slung down her pack and rifled through it, pulling out a set of rations. Kasha, meat stew, everything familiar. “Lunch. I know there’s essentially a famine here, so you’re living on dry rations—so I stuffed my pack with them when I came.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Hermione agreed. “Unfortunately. In Galicia, the situation was better, because it was favoured by the Morsmordre, to be blunt. Here, they’re barely above starvation levels.” She paused for a moment. “I’m fairly sure I’ve burned a fair number of other friendships, Lara.”</p><p>“Probably. But that isn’t going to change your career or your life, at this point. I mean, I’m not going to try and stop you from marrying into the same family that I’m marrying into, ‘Mione, that would be ridiculous. I came to the conclusion a while ago that your love for Bellatrix was an unstoppable force. Standing in front of it will just make everyone miserable for nothing. But some of your friends had to stand in front of it anyway, to be true to themselves. You can’t change that, <em>either.</em>”</p><p>“You’re right. I’m not really worried about it. I have Bella. Well, that’s not true; I was worried about Andromeda or Narcissa being upset that I might have caused drama, not really about anyone else. I know how serious it was that Bellatrix keyed me into the family wards, even before we formally proposed.”</p><p>“We?”</p><p>“I think it was fairly mutual, even if I started it.” A sly grin. “Does that answer the question?” She couldn’t help it, thinking about being married to Bellatrix made Hermione happy.</p><p>“...yes, thank you.” A pause, and perfectly deadpan: “Just to be absolutely clear, I proposed to Draco.”</p><p>“...I wouldn’t expect anything else, actually, Lara.”</p><p>“Good.”</p><p>A pause, chewing through a mouthful of food. The shadows through the windows stretched a bit longer. “What about Tonks?”</p><p>“Keeping herself busy. Probably for the best. You know that she is torn about this, she has to be. Her mentor, her teacher; and her husband, and her father, all dead. But her mother has reconciled with Bellatrix, and she’s been welcomed as part of the House of Black, and she needs the help of her mother and aunt Narcissa to raise little Teddy.”</p><p>“Harry was supposed to be his Godfather,” Hermione nodded quietly, pausing and then determinedly chewing again. “It would be good for Draco…”</p><p>“Oh don’t worry, he dotes on the little lad.”</p><p>“Our families are bound together now. Sirius made Harry the Lord Black, by law. It reverted to the women of the house only by his death. I am not sure how the family magic will respond to the royal decrees,” Hermione mused. “It should. Royal authority is a powerful, ancient magic of its own, even if a very subtle one.”</p><p>“I would think that, nonetheless, Narcissa is counting on you to represent a reconciliation between what Harry represents, and between what <em>she </em>represents.”</p><p>Hermione thought about that for a moment. <em>What does Narcissa represent? </em>Traditionalism, Celtic High Culture expressed tastefully enough that no Englishman would be uncomfortable with it, paternal conservatism that seemed just a little out of focus because she was motivated by the values and ethics of a pagan Witch, a real pagan, an old pagan, not some modern recreationist, and not the values of a High Anglican. The integration of the Magical and Muggle worlds on the basis of traditional orders. Different sorts of people, with different courts and privileges, who could nonetheless be loyal to the same country, same King, same ideal. She was a Slytherin and she was certainly ruthless. There was no smiling Albus Dumbledore to be the Supreme Warlock here. There was a Prime Minister’s office, with all the weight of the tradition and bureaucracy of a country of sixty millions behind it, not the insular world of less than a hundred thousand witches and wizards governed by the British Ministry of Magic.</p><p>What did Harry represent? A fantasy world for Witches and Wizards, really, that was what Dumbledore had been devoted to perpetuating ever since his break with Grindelwald. A world where the changing technology of humanity wouldn’t ever break through to threaten a place of chocolate frogs and lemon drops, where every wizard was a silly eccentric at heart and magic was used principally for silly things only secondarily for serious things.</p><p>In a way, Narcissa represented Grindelwald’s vision, just in the very polite, composed, respectable version made possible by the flexibility of British constitutionalism. She had seized the nettle tightly, deciding that a Witch in a prominent leadership position would need to very visibly uphold the constitutional order and deliver on a vast array of promises to provide ‘the Good life’ to the average British muggle. Anything else would lead to the destruction of her people, now that the veil between the two worlds was broken.</p><p>And Hermione agreed with her completely. Personally, she would do some things differently, but not in objective, not in the basic plan. That was impeccable. So where did Harry fit in? The support of the Boy Who Lived would be … Lemon drops, to help the medicine go down sweetly with the light side, the resistance that had been fighting Voldemort long enough, or opposing him in their hearts and minds long enough, to remember when Narcissa had been quite visibly on his side.</p><p>That was it.</p><p>And Hermione was okay with that.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>A man with a guitar was strumming out the lyrics to – when Master Flyorov arrived. He exchanged a few worlds in English with the group of soldiers, who pointed them on his way. The little song they sang was as old as time, with a few changes to fit the campaign:</p><p>
  <em>Was it only yesterday<br/>That we comrades marched away?<br/>Now they're covered up with clay.<br/>Seven glasses used to be<br/>Called for six good mates and me --<br/>Now we only call for three. <br/>Little crosses neat and white,<br/>Looking lonely every night,<br/>Tell of comrades killed in fight. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Hearty fellows they have been,<br/>And no more we’ll see ‘em,<br/>Drinking wine in good ole’ Santiago</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Strong and quick lads were they,<br/>Marching on their way --<br/>Was it only yesterday? </em>
</p><p>Flyorov quickly shook his head, and ducked inside. Dinner was set out, from rations, but with a bottle of wine from Galicia, that Bellatrix had brought along—rank hath its privileges. “Lady Black,” he offered in English, with quiet dignity.</p><p>“Vasily Gregorovich,” Bellatrix offered, looking up from her wine, as the two younger witches, on the other hand, greeted him as Master Flyorov. She poured out a cup of wine.</p><p>“Thank you,” he took it with a pleasant smile, and looked over the food. “I admit, it’s quite a change from the table you set in Georgia, Lady Black.”</p><p>“I don’t mind sharing with my soldiers,” Bellatrix replied. “There are more important things than food, sometimes; especially now. And anything tastes good, at this point in my life.”</p><p>“Every time that I might want to hate you, the world reminds me it is just a little bit more complex than that,” Flyorov remarked, allowing a touch of humour, and bemusement. It made Bellatrix laugh.</p><p>“Better if people your age, or best still, my age, fought wars,” he continued, “and not young men, and young women like Ladies Larissa and Hermione, here. Still, here we all are. I suppose a round of congratulations for all the impending weddings is in order?”</p><p>Larissa shook her head. “Oh please, Master Flyorov. After the war, only. I think for all of us.”</p><p>“Still, I’ll make arrangements for suitable gifts.” A glance, back to Bellatrix. “You have very good wine at your table.”</p><p>“Thank you. I do owe you something for taking care of Delphini when I was conducting the Crimean Operation.”</p><p>“It was nothing—I’m a grandfather, I like hosting children. Hopefully you don’t think I spoiled her.”</p><p>“I don’t, in fact.” Bellatrix smiled, Hermione thought it very genuine. “So,” she continued, “You have come to my headquarters, right very close to the front line, to discuss something specifically with myself and Hermione. I understand that this may in fact be related to the … Latest plan to win the war, which has so taken everyone in Britain.”</p><p>“It’s related to a young man who never got a chance to have a life,” Flyorov countered, but his voice was gentle. He meant those words. “I understand you have your own plan that you prefer, and I admit, it is not a bad one.”</p><p>“It proceeds from the belief that most prophecies are so much garbage,” Bellatrix answered. “As I tried to encounter the Dark Lord to think on several occasions. In fact, we now know what Potter’s power was, where it came from, why the Dark Lord couldn’t hurt him. Now that Harry is dead, the Dark Lord’s own protection is gone. His only safeguard is Nagini, and Nagini is loyal to <em>Riddle </em>because she is a sapient human woman who is forever trapped in the body of a snake, and Riddle knows Parseltongue. Heal Nagini of her curse, and she has no reason to follow him, assuming that her re-transformation into a human won’t outright disrupt the horcrux, because her fundamental essence will have changed.” She leaned back in her chair over a half-empty plate, and refilled her glass of wine. “In magic as in all things, you need to understand why things work, not just how.”</p><p>“But it may not,” Flyorov countered. “And if it doesn’t, will – Miss Nagini – be able to do anything to hurt the Dark Lord? We don’t know enough about horcruxes to be truly sure. I might say that my own belief is that the answer is no—we’d have a living horcrux on our side, but that does not stop Voldemort from reaching the Gate of a Billion Stars, in the depths of Ararat.”</p><p>Bellatrix closed her eyes. Sighed. “Well. I suppose that’s true. But how are you going to find the Water of Death? It’s not like you can just walk up to the Hut on Chicken Legs and ask for it in any random forest in Russia.”</p><p>“You’re right, you can’t,” Flyorov smiled, very faintly. Bellatrix’s eyes blinked open, and then narrowed. Hermione frozen. Larissa softly sucked in her breath. There was something in his expression, something deeply significant.</p><p>It was Bellatrix who understood it first. Of course it was. “You know. You’ve seen her,” she whispered, she hissed. “You’ve seen the Baba Yaga.”</p><p>“Oh yes, albeit, very briefly. She is not a companionable witch—or if you prefer, Goddess. Where one begins and the other one ends is sometimes not at all very clear,” Flyorov’s eyes glinted, so intensely. <em>This man taught dark arts, </em>Hermione reminded herself. For all that he was so charming and genteel, now they saw something else…</p><p>“You yourself have contributed much to the theory of magic. I’ve been reading every report from Hermione and Larissa that I could on electric magic. You know, your advances in that field are linked to another fundamental problem…”</p><p>“The lack of influence of magical healing on radiation damage?”</p><p>“Excellent, your mind is still formidable, Lady Black. Yes. And some progress was made in this matter, but it’s wrapped up in… A moment in my life when I lost many friends, when the whole world was threatened with destruction, something that happened, quite appropriately, near the great black swamps where old things linger.”</p><p>“Chernobyl,” Larissa hissed, and her former teacher nodded once.</p><p>“You see, ladies, there was a MinKol response to the Chernobyl disaster. And that was the first time that I looked Death in the eye—and that was when I met the Baba Yaga.”</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The lyrics of the British soldier's song were modified from this one, to be more "modern":</p><p>AFTER LOOS</p><p>(Cafe Pierre le Blanc, Nouex les Mines, Michaelmas Eve, 1915)</p><p>WAS it only yesterday<br/>Lusty comrades marched away ?<br/>Now they're covered up with clay.</p><p>Seven glasses used to be<br/>Called for six good mates and me --<br/>Now we only call for three.</p><p> </p><p>Little crosses neat and white,<br/>Looking lonely every night,<br/>Tell of comrades killed in fight.</p><p>Hearty fellows they have been,<br/>And no more will they be seen<br/>Drinking wine in Nouex les Mines.</p><p>Lithe and supple lads were they,<br/>Marching merrily away --<br/>Was it only yesterday?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0086"><h2>86. The Games We Play With Death</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>A smokey Spanish summer, in a ruined and desperate town, Army troops all around, in the aftermath of the apocalypse. Even now Chernobyl still had a mythical, horrible air to it. There were probably several equivalents in the world, where nuclear reactors had been outright “cracked” by nuclear bombs going off nearby. But Hermione had witnessed none. And the incineration and ejection of large parts of the core into the upper atmosphere would cause problems, but not the same concentrated problems as in the heart of the beast. </span>
</p><p>In a way, it was like a foretaste of the horrors of radiation in the war. She could see Larissa lean in with particular interest, and of course; Larissa had taken several hard doses and this was something that her teacher had never before had permission, or perhaps interest, to discuss.</p><p>“<span>We didn’t know any way of protecting ourselves from radiation, except for technological means. Magic seemed to have no answer for radiation.” Flyorov was looking distant. “There were six of us. I was chosen not only because of my family background and my knowledge of developments in Physics, but because of </span><span>… A theory we had developed at Koldovstoretz, </span><span>about how magic interaction with electricity. A theory, I might add, that Lady Black carried to fruition independently in the same era, but we knew nothing about, because…”</span></p><p>“<span>Because I was a Death Eater, and not publishing,” she murmured, distantly, perhaps Bellatrix for a moment was lost in the paths that she herself had not travelled, just as Master Flyorov was lost in the path he </span><em>had </em><span>travelled. A very grim path, indeed. </span></p><p>“<span>An awful excuse for a mind like your’s, Lady Black.”</span></p><p>“<em>I know,</em><span>” she answered, sharply, and </span><span>Hermione could see, could tell that it meant more than just a sharp, irritated comeback. It was absolutely true. Those who chose to defend her, and those who chose to pillory her, would both leave her theoretical genius as only a mere footnote to her other deeds and talents.</span></p><p>“<span>There’s still time for things to be different. And if Bella’s talent is important in this…” Hermione murmured.</span></p><p>“It might be,” Flyorov answered. “Allow me to be a professor, one more time.”</p><p>Larissa smiled wryly. “Of course, Master. You will certainly educate them.”</p><p>Hermione looked, genuinely curious.</p><p>“You see… British magical education is not so good on theory,” Flyorov began. “Oh, it is wonderfully applied, but the theoretical framework is terrible. This is common for all forms of British education—most British theoreticians operate from a ‘heroic’ model at the best of times. Many wrong, old theories are repeated for reasons of conservatism. Application, however, is great. There really is no stronger or more dangerous Dark Wizard in the world like Voldemort. Dumbledore, for all his almost embarrassing eccentricities, was certainly the greatest Light Wizard in two hundred years. But the theory? It’s all rotten at the core. We Russians are better at theory. Hermione, are you aware of the Theory of the Miracles of the Quran by Avicenna?”</p><p>“Uhm… The Islamic philosopher? A muggle?”</p><p>“One does not need to be magical to develop the precise theory of magic,” Flyorov answered simply. “Yes, him.”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes widened for a moment. This was, indeed, a radically different view of magic. “I’m aware of the Proof of the Truthful, that is, the theory of the Necessary Existent as the philosophical justification of God.”</p><p>“<span>That’s a good start,” Flyorov answered, a charming smile on his lips and a glint in his eye. Larissa was grinning, too. Bellatrix’s face was scrunched up, as if she were a bit upset, but also thinking hard, trying to get ahead of the conversation by raw brain-power. “</span><span>The </span><em>wājeb al-wojūd. </em><span>God, in the strict sense of the Necessary Existent. </span><span>A derivative of Neo-platonic philosophy so, to put it simply, the existence of God provides the reflections through which all other things exist. Avicenna’s theory of miracles followed necessarily from this: Soul-stuff, if you will, is part of what the German Idealists would call the Thing-in-Itself. It’s your very soul that reaches out to and influences the effect of magic. As Avicenna would say, it is the constitution of Man which allows them to be closer to the truth, or not. A Witch or a Wizard is closer to this knowledge and power than muggles by hereditary birth—we know this. Because it’s a matter of one’s constitution to perceive of this power. And the very concept of the magical core is wrong—it’s about the balance of one’s body and the strength of one’s will. Exhaustion of the magical core is a bankrupt theory of British magic; there is no magical core. That is your connection to the true reality of the universe. You can simply access it less well when you’re exhausted. Numbed. Using something so transcendent for the mundane for long periods of time separates your connection to wonder and mystery.”</span></p><p>
  <span>Now this, this was the kind of conversation that Hermione would have killed for in her later years at Hogwarts. </span>
</p><p>“<span>Waves aren’t matter, though,” Bellatrix murmured. “And that’s what I discovered. It’s about making your magical core—whatever you say it really is—</span><em>vibrate. </em><span>That’s how electricity and magic mix.”</span></p><p>“<span>Right, so you’re reaching out to the ideal wave-form, instead of the ideal particle-form. That’s it.” Flyorov chuckled as Bellatrix immediately narrowed her eyes.</span></p><p>Then she nodded. Grinned. “So. You can inactivate radioactive particulates in the same way I can use electric magic and regular spells at the same time. Because that would act on both elements at once. It’s nothing more than that.”</p><p>
  <em>Fuck, Bella being smart is hot. </em>
  <span>Then Hermione caught up and sucked in her breath. Yes, it made sense. It meant there was a clear-cut way for those same fundamental principles to extend to radiation. And it turned Hermione back to the subject at hand, clearly; that had probably been the Russian Professor’s intent. “So you thought you could turn off the core. Transmute it. On the basis of this theory—that’s what you did, you went into the Reactor, didn’t you? But, Gods, you didn’t </span>
  <em>know </em>
  <span>Electric magic like Bellatrix. You literally were trying to make a theory real on the spot.” </span>
</p><p>“<span>There was some fear it could wipe out all life in Eurasia,” Flyorov replied quietly; “so of course we had to try everything. Including, yes, trying to make a theory real on the spot, without hesitation. All of us volunteered for this mission, knowing that we would die, but we had the smallest hope that we would solve the problem first.” </span></p><p>
  <span>H</span>
  <span>e let that fact hang for a moment. “It didn’t work, of course,” Flyorov then continued, with the rapt attention of them all. “We didn’t have the necessary skills or practice to accomplish it. I </span>
  <em>think, </em>
  <span>with what she has already demonstrated, and the explanation of the theory that I have given her, that if the Bellatrix of today had been with us, she might have accomplished it. But such wishing is unproductive. My Comrades died, and I was dying. What I discovered in the tunnels, though, was something else.” </span>
  <span>He glossed quickly over what must have been frantic hours of preparation followed by grim and horrible hours of futility. He was alive, he was telling them about it, they didn’t need to know, they didn’t need to appreciate what it had been. So he left it behind, to his memories of the dead. </span>
</p><p>“<span>I found myself before a lake, in a dark hall, and saw the Chicken Legged Hut. Then I collapsed. I came to a while later, and I saw myself before the Baba Yaga.”</span></p><p>“Did she speak?” Larissa could manage barely more than a whisper.</p><p>“<span>Yes. She asked me what the point of souls were, when they were so much trouble to keep safe, and </span><span>the creatures with them cause so many troubles—</span><span>that they had created this problem, for the natural world.</span><span> I realised, after hearing the tale of the Door of a Billion Stars, what she meant by saying souls were so much trouble to keep safe.”</span></p><p>“<span>What did you tell her?” Bellatrix asked, into her cups again, a third glass, leaning back now, genuinely fascinated—he had them all.</span></p><p>“<span>I told her the people with souls, the muggles who had done this, would fix what they had broken. That what creates also destroys—and we who have souls were created in this image for precisely that role. We could not help it, but it’s the beauty of creation and destruction being the same hands, and anyway she did the same thing, by all the old tales—so I made the Baba Yaga laugh, and she gave one favour. I asked her to help, and she said that she already had, and then she told me—that the degeneration of matter was also a magical proble</span><span>m, not merely a muggle one. That the principle of the transmutation of matter will lead to the transmutation of souls.</span><span>”</span></p><p>“<span>And it is. The Firebird was necessary to reverse it,” Bellatrix sipped her wine, </span><span>with a frozen expression of a drowned woman—absolutely corpselike. Hermione reached out and folded her into a hug.</span><span> “And tell me, do you think it’s an accident that the tunnel to Hell at the bottom of Ararat was found so easily?”</span></p><p>“No, I don’t.”</p><p>“<span>What if… A Dementor is like the fission byproduct of a soul.”</span></p><p>Hermione closed her eyes, a horrifying flashback of the cave, of the Door, coming to her. She squeezed Bellatrix tightly, and understood why she looked the way that she did. “oh.”</p><p>“So if she already helped you, why do you think she’ll help you again?” Bellatrix continued, so distantly, her voice so wooden. “Gods are fickle.”</p><p>“She said that a living dead man can always ask for more Water of Death. It’s my privilege.” He smiled. “That was my one boon for amusing her.”</p><p>“You died in Chernobyl,” Larissa’s eyes fixed her former teacher’s. “And the Baba Yaga used the waters to bring you back. To give you a chance to explain.”</p><p>“And somehow I amused her – perhaps it was my Russian scent – enough to gain this privilege. And it’s now that I think we have all the ingredients. You see, the degeneration of matter is also a magical problem—this was not just a literal statement, but also a social and political one. She meant that in the future, the magical world would cause the same problem the muggle world had just caused.”</p><p>“<span>And by saving me and giving me knowledge of where to go…” He trailed off and wagged his hand. “I can bring Harry back. She already helped me. But until the idea was broached, until we understood precisely what we are dealing with—that Harry is part of Voldemort and Voldemort part of Harry, that the link between them is real—it was not obvious how this would help anyone. But now, it’s simple how it will.”</span></p><p>“<span>The Water of Death.” Hermione stared. “THE WATER OF DEATH!” She exclaimed. “It repairs the </span><em>dead, </em><span>so the Water of Life can bring them back to life subsequently</span><em>. </em><span>But i</span><span>t </span><em>kills </em><span>the living. We will destroy the Horcrux inside of Harry as part of the very same act as bringing him back to life. And that’s why </span><span>Voldemort didn’t just burn Harry’s corpse—he didn’t dare because </span><em>Harry is his second surviving Horcrux even while dead</em><span>! </span><span>Because the </span><em>Body is a reflection of the soul, </em><span>the unique capacity of the human being in creation, carrying our own light of the Almighty! Because Harry’s soul is immortal, his body can’t stop being a horcrux upon death. We have to kill the fragment of Voldemort—and that is the only way to remove it from Harry, we must kill the fragment itself, nothing less will do!</span><span>” </span></p><p>“<span>Yes,” Flyorov agreed. “</span><span>And so we find our way from philosophy to practical application. B</span><span>ut none of this was clear until he put so much effort, an entire military operation, into regaining the head of the poor lad. And our psychological profile said he made his military decisions personally to support his interests in the dark arts—so it quickly became clear that was the </span><em>only </em><span>objective of the London operation. And, at last, it all makes sense.” </span></p><p>“Why leave a Horcrux where it could be taken, though?” Larissa looked unsettled by it.</p><p>
  <span>It was Bellatrix who answered her. “</span>
  <span>I am sure some people were tortured to death for failing to convey the full military situation to him—when he didn’t care enough to listen anyway. So he simply didn’t expect London to fall. But more than that. The</span>
  <span> creature on the other side of the door </span>
  <span>can’t swallow part of his soul if it isn’t there. A Horcrux that’s kept somewhere else seems like a very good insurance policy when you go to negotiate your terms of alliance with the God of the Dementors. </span>
  <span>But he was so paranoid that we might know more than we knew, that he didn’t think an honourable grave was sufficient for Harry, so he tried to retrieve his </span>
  <em>second </em>
  <span>existing Horcrux. And in the process, told us what we needed to know.</span>
  <span>” </span>
</p><p>“<span>Why did he think we knew?” Larissa wondered.</span></p><p>“Because invading Britain from Norway when western Russia, when central Europe, were all occupied—it was unexpected to them,” Hermione explained as the last threads came together. “It seemed reckless. So we had to have a plan. And that’s true; but they just didn’t appreciate what the plan really was. It wasn’t a plan to defeat him. It was Narcissa’s plan to keep Bellatrix safe.”</p><p>“<span>Riddle always has thought the world revolved around him,” Bellatrix whispered, still looking as white as a ghost, and very fragile. </span></p><p>Hermione leaned over, and kissed her cheek.</p><p>“How much time do you think we have?” Larissa asked.</p><p>“None at all,” Bellatrix whispered. “There is something in the air again. I fear he has ‘opened negotiations’, by whatever rituals make the God of Dementors pay attention to you.”</p><p>“How do you know? Wasn’t in the same for the raising in the Inferi in London?”</p><p>“I can feel my left arm like it is still attached to my body, screaming at me,” Bellatrix whispered through clenched teeth, “as His power bleeds into me through the whole world. A ghost of the Mark. It tells me nothing, it asserts no power over me. But it <em>hurts.</em>”</p><p>Hermione wanted to help Bellatrix, wanted to make the pain go away, but what solution was there? There was a faint buzz of a summons to Hermione’s radio. With a sickening lurch to her stomach, she knew that Bellatrix of course had to be right. So, she looked up. “Master Flyorov, how long will it take us to get to Chernobyl?”</p><p>
  <span>Master Flyorov looked straightaway at her and forced her to meet his gaze. His words were gentle, anyway. </span>
  <span>“Hermione, you know that it still involves – especially with no maintenance to the </span>
  <span>Reactor </span>
  <span>Sarcophagus for the past six years – it will be the utmost hazard.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>L</span>
  <span>arissa leaned in. “You’re not going without me.” </span>
  <span>Her former professor shot her a look.</span>
</p><p>“<span>I assume I am to remain here in command of the Army,” Bellatrix observed, almost hoarsely. </span></p><p>Flyorov gave her a single nod of acknowledgement. “For what it is worth, we must still execute your plan, rely that lifting the curse, ending the snake and restoring Nagini as a human being, will disperse the second remaining Horcrux.</p><p>“<span>I am much more worried about whether or not Hermione dies from the radiation than I am about whether or not my theories get any credit for the destruction of Voldemort, Vasily Gregorovich. But good; I am glad we agree. I had thought restoring Nagini to humanity was critical to disrupt her existence as the last Horcrux, </span><span>but even with what we’ve discovered today… A horcrux is a horcrux and must be dealt with.” She sighed. “I’m going to get up and find out what’s going on. You should all get to sleep.”</span></p><p>Hermione saw the longing in it, and felt it, too. But Bellatrix was right. She could die much more easily if she were tired, and made a mistake. The night before you went to Chernobyl was not a night to cuddle in bed.</p><p>Still, Flyorov offered her a kindly smile. “Lady Black, you yourself have already protected the woman you love. You’ve shown her your electric magic. Surely you don’t doubt that the Brightest Witch of Her Age can shield herself, with that practice and theory combined?”</p><p>Bellatrix looked to Hermione, eyes welling with tears. “Shock them all with how great you are, ‘Mione,” she whispered. “I love you so much.” And with a rueful grin, she turned away.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Diyarbakir in late June. The temperature hovered at about 30 centigrade during the day, but rapidly dropped with the evening, so far inland, in a world that had been left so cold. Antonin Dolohov stepped briskly, responding to his Master’s summons. Like every Death Eater and Wizard in the city, he had been facing the Dark Lord’s wrath of late, with the actually responsible parties dying, and others—in for unpleasant times.</p><p>There was something deeply unpleasant about the air in the town that night, and he wondered about the hold of Ararat, only two hundred and twenty kilometres away, from his Master. They had been told the final offensive would begin soon, and there was muttering despite the harshness of the repressions, because it didn’t seem like they had the balance of forces to break the front. Perhaps in a few more weeks, they could make their one and (most likely) only attempt.</p><p>Dolohov knew better than to doubt his Master so much. The naysayers were making assumptions based on the fact that the Dark Lord had been more and more distracted from handling the course of the war. But that was a state which could change, and change rapidly. If his Master had cause to be interested in the course of the War, he would be. And he was.</p><p>And something was up in the occupied city that night, which even with all of the death and destruction, was still the home of one million people living in fear and terror under the Dark Lord’s fist, scurrying out of sight at the presence of the Dark Lord himself or his minions, muggles who were lower than Mud to them. Creatures to be killed out of hand at the slightest hint of disrespect.</p><p>An ill fog seemed to begin to cover the city, as Dolohov moved into his Master’s chambers. What had just been a perception, a sense, before that point, was now becoming a real thing. That was very unsettling indeed. He saw Voldemort standing before a vast, bubbling cauldron.</p><p>“So little remains,” Voldemort mused, clearly speaking to him. He dropped to a knee. “M’lord.”</p><p>“Rise, witness the hour of our triumph”, Voldemort answered, in a way that made his skin chill and crawl.</p><p>Dolohov kept his head lowered as he crept forward.</p><p>“The power in the mountain is not like other forms of magic power,” Voldemort mused. “You might say, that if you are in touch with it, as you have put me, my good man, it is something that can extend a loan of its power, before the deal is executed.”</p><p>“M’lord?”</p><p>“At some level, it appreciates that its own best interests are not in absolute destruction,” Voldemort continued. “This makes it a surprisingly approachable power. And I have the necessary precautions well in hand to make sure that this is an equal exchange. I had hoped for more time…. But here we are. It will do.”</p><p>Dolohov looked out and saw that the lights in the city were now obscured. Voldemort was dripping his own blood into the cauldron.</p><p>Then he reached down into the boiling cauldron, without apparent pain, and pulled something out—an obsidian dagger. Dripping with ooze, he presented it to Antonin. “You will keep this with your life and soul for me. And when we come to the mountain, you will use it exactly as I command, no matter how odd the command is. Do you understand?”</p><p>Dolohov, then, was the last reliable man left standing. It would have been an enviable place, if the situation for their cause was not so dire. So he bowed, and gave a single nod. “I will obey unhesitatingly, and instantly, when commanded.”</p><p>“Very good. Extending a loan from this bank requires a perfect absence of fear.” He chuckled at his own joke, as no-one else would, and walked out onto the balcony of the building, bidding Dolohov to follow him. “It is not interested in anything except for souls, and interestingly enough, it’s not greedy, Dolohov. One can easily manage a world to supply what it wants, in exchange for its power. And, the more you kill in its name, the larger your Army becomes. A reliable Army, unencumbered by traitors such as the Blacks and the Malfoys.”</p><p>His voice took on an air, as seductive as it had ever been. “No wand… No incantation. Look at the power it has already lent me, Dolohov.” He bid one of the wolf-warriors that Fenrir had created for him to approach, massive and silent, and carrying a box which seemed perfectly square, and carved with sigils that Dolohov did not recognise, but also made out of obsidian, obsidian carved too finely and polished too smoothly to exist. No, worse, it seemed a box forged of blackness itself.</p><p>Voldemort opened it in the creature’s hands, and removed from it, though they were all larger than the box was—dimensionality didn’t matter to this kind of hideous power—the Deathly Hallows. He raised the Elder Wand.</p><p>He spoke, and Dolohov cringed in a terrible fear. The incantation he used with the wand was not a human tongue, not a vocalised thing in a way that any muggle could fathom, but to someone who had known their hideous power, it was clear what it was.</p><p>It was the speech of Dementors.</p><p>As it rolled off Voldemort’s tongue into a plain at a right-angle to normal sound, to normal acoustics, a sound and yet not a sound, it reverberated through the old walled city. Then a terrifying thundercrack passed through the sky, buffeting them such that Dolohov and even the werewolves were almost knocked to the ground. He felt a tugging, like his soul wanted to fly free. Around him, little black dust motes of power spun like a gyre, but Voldemort casually flicked the Elder Wand toward him, and the sensation at once left his body, leaving behind a state of hollow relief. Voldemort <em>smiled </em>at him, in bemusement. “I wouldn’t want you to leave just when things are getting interesting.”</p><p>Black whirlpools of these motes formed all across the city.</p><p>A wail tore the night, as a million voices cried out at once in fear.</p><p>It was abruptly silenced.</p><p>The entire population of the city—a million people—dropped down dead, the flesh rent, ripped away, vanished from their bones at once.</p><p>And then in the same moment, began to rise again, eye-sockets glowing with an unearthly black light. In a war that had seen the deaths of billions, it was only a statistic, but those deaths had come by fire, blood, technology, radiation, famine, disease.</p><p>In a single second, an unfathomable horror of an evil, unearthly dark magic had laid out dead one million people, civilians all. Voldemort had extended his protection only to those he desired alive.</p><p>The others never mattered to him at all, except as the resources they had become, souls to sacrifice, and bodies to enslave, far more certain in their obedience than any treasonous ‘Brightest Witch of Her Age’.</p><p>And then with a soft laugh, he turned back toward his palace. “One more thing, my good man.” The neatly and tightly folded cloak of invisibility was grasped firmly in hand, and Voldemort shook it, and unfolded it, like he was dusting a rug. But though it had been folded as flat as a napkin –</p><p>Out rolled Albus Dumbledore’s body, perfectly restored as if he had just died.</p><p>“I thought a new friend of one’s would be perfectly suited for bringing an end to the traitors to our cause,” Voldemort explained like a laugh.</p><p>Dolohov, in the midst of that death, had never seen something so utterly unnerving, so unnatural, so at cross-purposes with how normal magic worked, as the way the cloak unfolded from a veritably two-dimensional state, and a wholly formed man rose up, as if he had been merely sleeping, instead of immaterial.</p><p>And Voldemort was laughing.</p><p>The city was so very, very quiet.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I owe the unfolding or unrolling of the body of a resurrected and puppeted person from a cloak to Thomas Harlan's Oath of Empire series. It truly creates a dreadful picture of horror, at odds with the normal function of the laws of the universe in a way that would seem to be unable to exist, particularly from the perspective of someone actually looking at it with their own eyes.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0087"><h2>87. The Edge of Darkness</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Winning, so much easier said than done. Real commanders study logistics, not strategy or tactics, the conventional wisdom of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. In a way—it was completely undone here. No completely, without the mass armies they wouldn’t be in the place that they were. But Hermione knew that by the conventional wisdom, Voldemort, without his industrial power-base, was finished.</p><p>She also knew that conventional wisdom was wrong. As long as Voldemort remained alive, he was enormously dangerous. He had devoted himself completely to the Dark Arts. He probably knew more about the nightmare in the bottom of the mountain than everyone else on the planet combined.</p><p>And it all came back to Harry. That damned prophecy wouldn’t give him any rest. Nor did her own conviction allow her to be anything else than loyal to her friend. And that was why she was standing in front of Ron again. In fairness to him, he was reserved in response. He knew how momentous this was, himself. How utterly dangerous. He didn’t appreciate it like Hermione did, who grew up in the shadow of a Europe impacted by the Chernobyl disaster, but he had now lived as a part of the muggle world long enough to know he was signing up for a mission into the heart of their equivalent to Azkaban, some kind of truly dark, sinister place; and that was enough.</p><p>“Hermione.”</p><p>“Ron.”</p><p>“For Harry?” Ron asked, and held out his hand.</p><p>Hermione was acutely aware of Larissa and Master Flyorov watching them. And, it wasn’t that hard, really. It would have been better if both of them had just remained Harry’s friends, if they’d never tried dating. It would have made all of this easier. <em>And I’m sure Bellatrix wishes she’d never been a Death Eater, at this point. </em>She reached out, took Ron’s hand firmly. “For Harry.”</p><p>It seemed like a palpable feeling of tension left the room. Around them, London was coming back to life. Narcissa was absolutely unflinching about moving quickly to return life to normal. She had used the military to repair damage to the city, and Goblins under contract, and once again had the trains running within three days of the horrifying outbreak. The clearing of bodies had been completed in five days, though the stench of the pyres still hung in the city. Invoking the spirit of the Blitz, demolition of burned out buildings and preparation for rebuilding was underway, within two weeks of the attack.</p><p>The Ministry of Magic, where they now stood, had been thoroughly repaired and showed no evidence whatsoever of the raid. The meetings and introductions being done, Ron led them to a room where Tonks was waiting, immediately visible with her pink hair, laying out a bunch of photographs on top of a table. A tea pot was fortunately available. Luna was there, braiding flowers into her hair as she looked over the maps.</p><p>Tea gave Hermione the opportunity to distract herself, looking dully at the photographs. A decade ago they would have filled her with horror—they were aerial and on-site photos of Chernobyl and she was going to <em>go there. </em>She waved to Luna, who pointedly ignored it when Ron gave her something of a dirty look—but at least didn’t say a word. “Doing alright?” Hermione answered.</p><p>“Oh yes.” Luna looked up with a positively brilliant smile. “I never thought I’d get to meet the Baba Yaga; as long as I don’t end up in her pot it seems like it will be the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened.”</p><p>
  <em>Oh Luna. </em>
  <span>Hermione could tell she was perfectly sincere, too. </span>
</p><p>“So, as kind of our peak of fucked up shit in this war, we’re about to all go looking for the Baba Yaga inside of a melted down reactor,” Tonks began without preamble, cutting the odd conversation off from possibly getting any more odd. “The Russians kindly arranged to provide all the intelligence they could, mostly photographs from around the period of the construction of the Sarcophagus.”</p><p>“Needless to say,” Tonks continued; Hermione was dimly looking at the pictures, drinking her tea, focused on the woods but with the room itself out of focus. “One complication is that Chernobyl is behind enemy lines. So, our apparating into the exclusion zone will bring an immediate response. Pursuant to a request to Stavka, a major corps-level operation will be conducted as a distraction against the enemy. At the same time, six infiltration groups will be sent behind enemy lines, to join partisans. We will infiltrate under the cover of one of these groups.” A pause. A wry grin. “O’course, knowing our luck, we’ll still get hit by some kind of Morsmordre group on the way in or out.”</p><p>“So. Master Flyorov isn’t a combatant, though he is a talented wizard. But he’s a particularly important part of this operation, so we all need to protect him. His life comes before our’s, necessarily.”</p><p>“Ladies..” He was clearly uncomfortable. Hermione looked up.</p><p>It was in time to watch as Tonks grinned ruefully and transformed herself into a lean, dark-haired man, with a killer’s air. “Wotcher. I’ll go like this, if that will make you feel better.”</p><p>“It’s fine, Master Flyorov. We’ve been doing this for a long time.” Hermione raised her cup.</p><p>“I’ve been there before,” he reminded them. “I should have just as well said <em>Comrades, </em>to avoid misconceptions.” A faint smile, however grim. “But the reality is that you are all young enough to have children. It’s objective fact that this is a greater risk for women than men, you know, so, I am merely asking that you take no unnecessary risks for me, whatsoever. Just get me to the Baba Yaga. Really. That’s all. My coming back is optional.”</p><p>“Master…” Larissa bit her lip, and in that expression on her face, Hermione saw eight years of school, of learning magic, of the Black Court, in a different time, in a time of peace. Eight years of being a girl, an experience for which she would not know Larissa, could never know Larissa. They would be friends, comrades in arms, even relatives by marriage if they all survived the war. But their childhoods they would never quite understand of each other. One was Hogwarts, one was Koldovstoretz, they hadn’t experienced them together, and they had met on a train platform, in Nizhniy Novgorod, after the world had already ended, after the nuclear bombs had already flown. They could be the closest of friends forever, but they did not share that essential knowledge. Flyorov did, and perhaps he was one of precious few who did at this point.</p><p>After all, the retired professor had seen so many of his former students go off to war. How many of Larissa’s class were left? They were all the right age to, unflinchingly, become part of MinKol’s front-line uniformed units. They had turned their magic to the service of war—to the defence of the Motherland.</p><p>And Hermione would never have Bellatrix’s thoughtless honesty, would never just out and out ask how many of Larissa’s friends were left. She didn’t want to torture one of her best friends, by bringing it up.</p><p>But whatever the answer was, it was plain to see on Larissa’s face—she desperately didn’t want Flyorov to die.</p><p>And the old teacher clapped his hands on the table. “Dear Larissa, think nothing of it,” he offered gently. “We have one more lesson in the esoterica of our native Russia to learn. It’s time we got about it. Neither of us is in a good place to hesitate, or to worry. We will just do what must be done.” And his eyes glittered. “And as I said, you have one more lesson to learn.”</p><p>Larissa wiped at her eyes and straightened up. “Then we review the plan, we memorise it, we make the necessary arrangements, and we fight the plan. We will be in and out, in whatever time the Baba Yaga lets us go.” She grinned with ruthless intensity to Hermione, and rose to her feet, using her wand to project from the images, a magical table-top model of the reactor complex and the sarcophagus. “Let’s get to our work.”</p><p>
  <em>Gods, but I hope we make it through this. </em>
  <span>This close to a possible end to the war, the idea of peace seemed almost magical, the idea of dying now, worse than ever before. For once, after so many years, she had something worth living for.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>I’m sorry, Bellatrix, that we can’t be together right now. </em>
</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Alone, except for a staff that had come to respect and trust her absolutely, no matter how eccentric she was. A staff <em>she </em>had come to trust. The battle rhythm of her staff was perfect, almost divine at this point. But the lack of Hermione’s presence—of her cool professionalism around the others, her intellectual and quick-minded analysis—was a constant reminder of that <em>other </em>side of her, the straightjacketed passion which had, at last, exploded in her presence on that one cold night in the Crimean.</p><p>
  <span>Bellatrix could never straightjacket anything about herself. Especially after Azkaban; it was on her sleeve, and there it would remain, for the rest of her life. </span>
  <span>She supposed that life, after those fourteen years, was just too important to her for her to limit herself in anything. </span>
</p><p>Memories were strange. The happy memories she <em>did </em>have from childhood seemed so exceptionally distant. Yet, when circumstances had allowed it, she had fallen back in with Andy without another thought. Blood truly was thicker than water. <em>What does that say about Hermione, then? </em></p><p><em>She’s your blood now. That’s all there is too it. </em>She looked down over her ration and instant coffee. They were nothing like what a pureblood would consider a meal, but she loved every bite; after Azkaban even the worst muggle attempts at food were delectable. <em>A Pureblood. Delphini’s a Half-blood, she’s still Heir Black, by Cissy’s decree. </em>The whole world turned upside down, and she’d participated in it from the start. She supposed her disenchantment with Riddle had started when the resistance, after the Battle of Hogwarts, had made sure that his real identity was widely known. People had been tortured to death horribly for that. But it had not stopped the information from spreading.</p><p>The very same man who had spent decades stoking her hatred of mudbloods and blood-traitors to a fine-honed hot rage that prevented her from really thinking, was himself the son of a woman of the oldest family of England, who had taken a muggle to her bed. It was all a fucking farce. Her precious daughter was one-quarter muggle.</p><p>Her wife-to-be was all muggle, but had a magical core just as strong as her own. <em>Well, almost all muggle. I should have her geneaology commissioned, sometime. </em>It would be interesting to see where and when the magic had got in. Bellatrix finished her food. Like most soldiers, and most former convicts, too, she ate fast. There wasn’t much time in those worlds for a good meal, and you wanted to make sure that all of it ended up in <em>your </em>stomach.</p><p>Getting up with just of the rest of the coffee, the retort pouches empty, she head out of the tent and into the next—the set of tents and awnings that were her command headquarters. The invasion force of Galicia was in the process of being comprehensively destroyed by air attack as it tried to retreat across the mountains with its supply lines cut by her forward divisions. The artillery was thundering in the distance, but that was just a normal morning by this point. Had been for so long that it scarcely could be remarked upon.</p><p>Really, her unease was just that Hermione was going into danger, and she wasn’t there with her. The sun-baked wind blew dust across the command post, and the steady tick of the geiger counter, reminding them all they were safe—at least in that dust, at that single instant in time--was also to her a reminder of how much danger her lover was in.</p><p>Her bones had ached since Azkaban. They ached again, now, maybe they would never stop, but the warm air soothed them. Jorge was there now, and she was glad to see him, glad to have him as her right hand, even though she knew his own loyalties in this situation were a complicated matter. He was on their side, to the death, but Narcissa’s plans contradicted the vision of a unified Spain.</p><p>Bellatrix had an idea about that. She stepped over to the map tables. “Good morning, Jorge.” Only two years ago this informality between them would have been unimaginable.</p><p>“Lady Black,” he acknowledged.</p><p>“The Portuguese forces are still holding in Braganza?”</p><p>“They are, M’lady. And we’re almost to Tordesillas. Our lead units haven’t encountered significant resistance.”</p><p>“And then we swing to take Valladolid, and from there, we’re in position to cut them off completely, and strike south to seize Madrid. Well, until Basque and Catalonian troops come up and give us a real fight.”</p><p>“Only if the Portuguese refuse to make another attempt to cross the border,” Jorge looked at the map, coldly. “We’re exposing ourselves quite intensely, otherwise.”</p><p>“I understand that the Duke of Albemarle led a major air raid on Lisbon yesterday, with the Grand Fleet,” Bellatrix answered. “Perhaps it even removed some of the most onerous members of the collaborationist government. Portugal may yet find itself in an agreeable position to switch sides. The wizarding community there has very old ties with our’s. Queen Mary—I mean, <em>our </em>Queen Mary, in the sixteenth century—her witch’s blood came from the Portuguese community. It had nothing to do with the English wizarding community. But it was through the House of the Duke of Braganza, and the north of Portugal is nearly as Celtic as Galicia. And still, her portrait is on the wall of Hogwarts.”</p><p>“M’lady?” Admittedly, when Jorge asked that, Bellatrix knew he was hinting for her to get to the point.</p><p>“I understand enemy Janissaries are besieging Nantes, but they have almost none left in all of western Europe. As long as they are pinned down trying and failing to make gains in Brittany, we can do much good here. We are in a good position to spread a message of revolt to the people, in Castile. If we can pry Portugal loose, it will be now or never for a revolt in Castile. There’s no functional government of the Morsmordre at this point, with Riddle having moved everything to Anatolia in his effort to take Ararat. We need to keep tearing chunks into the enemy. And I have an old friend of Portuguese wizarding extraction…”</p><p>“The Duke of Albemarle’s mother?”</p><p>“Yes—Keep pushing into Tordesillas with the lead elements until we encounter resistance, than alert me, Jorge. I need to use the Telecaster to reach out to Cissy.”</p><p>Jorge tipped his hand in a salute as Bellatrix turned around. She was about to head into the armoured vehicle where that wonder of ancient Crete was kept, but then she paused, and turned back to him with a grin. “You do want to head the Junta if this all comes together, don’t you?”</p><p>He turned to her. A smile twitched on his face below the thin moustachio. “After all I have been through, it means nothing to me, M’lady—I’m perfectly content with merely obtaining my revenge, and that I’ve already done, in your service.” A pause.</p><p>“But, really, it means everything in the world.”</p><p>Bellatrix laughed, and turned again. <em>Really, we understand each other perfectly. Friends with a muggle. How strange to live to see myself like that. </em></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>International Portkey to Moskva, and then the restored Floo network as far as Bryansk. The beautiful old Railway station at Bryansk-I was partially bombed out, but near to the MinKol headquarters with the Floo connection, and restored enough to serve Army purposes. A little bit of the old, pleasant, light pink paint was left, but the repairs were grey. Inside, they were able to get bowls of meat stew there, and the strong brewed Russian tea that Hermione realised she inordinately missed; she had taken to drinking Irish breakfast tea in Britain, as it was the strongest that she could find, but it was still not quite so smokey. Of course, most of the time she just drank whatever she could find.</p><p>Just like she smoked whatever she could find. With a grimace and a guilty expression toward a Bellatrix not there, she wandered off, and in a typical deal of the sort that went down between soldiers, exchanged two British ration packs several packs of Belomorkanals. Returning to the group, she handed one to Larissa.</p><p>Her friend grinned back at her. “Draco and Bella will be upset at us.”</p><p>“If they’re upset, and we get back alive, fuck them. If we don’t…” Hermione shrugged. She desperately needed that old familiar feeling to soothe her nerves before flying straight to the edge of Darkness.</p><p>Larissa nodded in acknowledgement of that. They both lit up. The acrid taste and horrible strength was reassuring in a way. They were back, back to the front where they had both started fighting, and they were about to face far worse carcinogens than any found in the cigarettes.</p><p>Tonks caught them, rolled her eyes, but just grinned and waved. “Let’s go, they’ve got the machine ready for us,” she said, in Russian. They all reverted to speaking the language, the moment they returned to the country; it just felt natural, now. Even Ron did.</p><p>Others left the Bryansk train station to the front on wagons—rake after rake of goods vans or passenger carriages. But their mission was of a different level of importance, entirely. An Mi-8 was waiting for them, the rotors spinning even at idle enough to whip the wind over them. Hermione took a last drag on her cigarette and stamped it out; no smoking and flying and the wind would whip it out if she ignored that, anyway.</p><p>They clambered aboard and took their seats. Hermione and Larissa, who had plenty of experience in combat helicopters, took positions by the doors to the passenger comapartment, and left them open, so they could use their wands against troops or enemy wizards on the ground. Such was an engrained habit, even while they were well behind their own lines. They were about to conduct a raid, after all, and the enemy could do the same.</p><p>The two women leaned against each other as the hot summer air slowly faded to a cool sharp breeze through the open door, their wands ready as the helicopter headed west, eyes mutually scanning the terrain. Below them, columns of troops heading to the front marched down roads, and column after column of trucks, armoured vehicles, tactical vehicles and tanks could be seen, some trucks hauling artillery, others self-propelled. There were were more improvised weapons, more truck mounted heavy automatics and things like that, too. The reserve stocks were being exhausted, and the military industry was straining to meet the demands of the war effort, even as there were calls for more and more troops, and younger and older men came to the front, and women and girls too. Again and again, a call for more reinforcements for the front went out, and more conscripts were mustered into the service, and sent forward. Now, at least, many of them were Ukrainians and Belarusians from the liberated sectors, eager to get revenge on the formerly occupying Army, and finish the job of liberating their homelands.</p><p>Under the golden glow of the sun, they could see the flax growing, the wheat, the barley and rye. They could see, too, the ground that was still freshly churned, where mass graves had been dug, to be filled with the bodies of the executed civilians the Morsmordre had killed, and left to rot along the sides of the roads, for the liberating armies to find as they had advanced. And, no doubt, some other mass graves, for the collaborators and the enemy dead.</p><p>
  <span>Ahead of them, fields gave way to forests and rivers and marshes. This was a part of Chthonic Russia, the birthplace of the religion of the Slavs, of dark forests and sacrifices. Gomel first, but then beyond it, the Pripyat. Hermione occasionally glanced behind her, to see Flyorov sitting, so calm and composed. She didn’t know how he did it, and it was such a contrast with Ron, so obviously tense and ready for a fight. Perhaps it was just a benefit of old age, but she couldn’t imagine Bellatrix ever acting like that even when she was hopefully a happy grandmother of a Witch celebrating her 120</span>
  <sup>
    <span>th</span>
  </sup>
  <span> birthday. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Hermione’s steady brown eyes flickered back to the terrain. They couldn’t pull away from it for long. Didn’t dare. Even if there was no risk, the old habits were too well engrained. She couldn’t imagine flying in one of these machines, without being ready to defend it from magical attack at all times. Tonks was keeping the very same guard on the other side; war had changed her forever, too, probably more radically than it had Hermione.<br/></span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her nerves and reflexes would probably never calm down. She felt lean, sun-beat, muscled, physically fit and healthy as had seemed impossible in her younger years. Her hair was very tightly pulled back in a bun, to restrain the kinky, frizzy mass. Her freckles were set dark on brown skin, and sunglasses protected her from the glare of the sunlight off of lakes and rivers, as she caught glimpse of drained reservoirs, marked by destroyed dams and valleys caked with mud and silt, cut heavily by rain-driven rapid erosion. She felt good, even as she was grim about her chances, about all of their chances. If death was to come to her, she wanted it now, having managed to make something of herself despite something. She felt alive, and understood very well why Bellatrix acted the way she did. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Understood very well why Larissa acted the way she did. </span>
</p><p>“<span>Lara?” </span></p><p>“’<span>Mione?”</span></p><p>“<span>If we go down…”</span></p><p>“<span>We go down together,” Larissa agreed, and smiled tightly. They were looking out over the forests and marshes and approaching Gomel, now, and the sun was going down. Soon enough she could take her sunglasses off. </span></p><p>
  <span>Life was beautiful, for all its horror. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then they headed to the edge of darkness. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>It's quite explicit that Queen Mary of England was a witch, but JKR also notes that the British Royal Family is not magical. So, it's quite rational to assume the magical blood was in the House of Aviz and carried through the maternal line. Perhaps Isabella the Catholic was so intensely religious to hide any element of suspicion!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0088"><h2>88. Pripyet</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The plan necessarily hinged on the enemy not knowing what they were looking for. That was both reasonable and yet the greatest calculated risk. They would, after all, have to come <em>close </em>to Chernobyl to be dropped off, close enough to walk in. They would have to sidealong with one of the infiltration teams, which was going to apparate from place, to place, to place to throw off the scent and confuse the trackers, the wards that were set up along the front to try and minimise the ability of the enemy to do this.</p><p>Of course, those wards were the wards of the Morsmordre. They were the enemy. But their own system was set up exactly the same way, and they knew that the defences of Voldemort’s armies worked mostly the same way. If nothing else… Bellatrix had once told them as much.</p><p>Gomel if anything was more completely ruined than Bryansk, and was close enough to the front to still be under harassment fire from the Morsmordre forces. The people of the city who remained, lived like rats, in the basements of houses and apartment blocks hammered to pieces by the shelling. The Army was still dug in, amidst rubble that had been fought over in close quarters several times. The headquarters, where they landed, was amidst the Centralny District on the eastern outskirts of the city, filled with heavy, thick-built concrete apartment blocks which had stood up to the shells and bombs well, and now held observation points for their own artillery, temporary radar masts, and radio aerials.</p><p>Colonel Kabanov was there, Hermione realised with a start as they headed over through cut half-trenches that zig-zagged around the ruined towers. The mysterious man who had helped Tonks orchestrate Bellatrix’s original defection was briefing the infiltration team whose entire mission and whose lives, if necessary, would serve as cover for them.</p><p>Tonks bid them wait, until he finished his briefing and turned toward them. They exchanged a salute.</p><p><em>Here we go, </em>Hermione thought. The sun was now falling fast into the marshes and forests and ruins that marked the western horizon. It wouldn’t be long at all; the more time they spent in Gomel, the more the risk of detection was.</p><p>Mostly they were of a similar rank. Assuming that Colonel Kabanov’s rank was, indeed, his real rank. They exchanged salutes, and handshakes. The man paid special attention to Hermione, saying, after eyeing her for a moment, “you have done well for yourself, Councillor.”</p><p>Hermione nodded once. “Well, Colonel, I took advantage of the opportunities presented to me. There’s an English song to that effect; ‘When Cannons are Roaring’. Junior Councillor Lovegood could sing it for you, but I fear we haven’t the time.”</p><p>There was the faintest hint of a smile of amusement from the FSB Colonel. “No, we don’t,” he agreed.</p><p>The witch faintly felt from behind her what might be a glare from Ron, but she didn’t really care. He might think that she slept her way to power, but she had grown confident in the fact that she had earned this. Earned his enmity, too, sure; but it was indeed true that ‘when cannons are roaring and bullets are roaring, he who would honour win must not fear dying’, and she had dared greatly. And she wasn’t going to let herself be chained to any doubt or guilt. She was certain that McGonagall would tell her to pick her head up and do exactly that.</p><p>Kabanov tapped his chronometer. “They’ll be departing in five minutes. Because of the enemy detection spells, you must all side-along. Three disapparations in short succession. Then you’ll be within the Exclusion Zone. They’ll continue along and leave you behind. You <em>must move without magic very rapidly from that position. </em>We know from past attempts that the enemy will sweep the mid-point apparation locations for infiltrators.”</p><p>“We’ll make scarce when we get there,” Tonks assured him, almost placidly. She had likely done it before. “Let’s go.”</p><p>“Of course.” Kabanov turned and led them over to the main group, as the others got up and fell in. Larissa fell back, though, to stand with Flyorov, speaking softly. Her lips were pursed in a state of discomfort, and Hermione knew that her friend was still deeply uncomfortable about her teacher coming along on this mission. Taking these risks, at all.</p><p>The men before them were gearing up, grabbing their packs, finishing streaking paint across their faces, swinging weapons on slings over the should, barrels down, ready. Some crossed themselves, made their final prayers before going in. The group of MinKol wizards and witches came to the fore, intentionally blending in, with the same equipment. Only wands and their position in the formation marked them differently, and the later would disappear as soon as they arrived at their destination.</p><p>Hermione found herself face to face with a young blonde witch, who didn’t know her name, or why she was helping to disapparate this group, to apparate them three times into the heart of the exclusion zone. She just knew it was her job.</p><p>After all, she herself had been in the same place, five years before, but even more alone, fighting for a foreign country, which was no longer completely foreign, and never would be again. Reaching out, she took the woman’s hand with her own. In case this woman was captured, she shouldn’t even say her name—it could lead to a much higher prioritisation of a sweep of the Exclusion Zone, for example. Kabanov had certainly briefed the others as much already. Indeed, he might not even know the real reason for their mission himself, by the design of his superiors.</p><p>“Comrade,” Hermione just offered warmly, instead.</p><p>The Russian witch did not smile, the circumstances did not call for it. They’d probably never meet again. But instead of a smile, the dangerous grin Hermione got instead meant much, much more. “<em>Ni pukha ni pera.</em>”</p><p>“<em>k</em><em>e </em><em>chortu!</em>”</p><p>Four soldiers joined them, and Kabanov’s chronometer hit the mark. His raised hand dropped.</p><p>Hermione and all the others were torn away, funnelled through a spinning feeling of sickening chaos and spat out in a fallow field. Landing, breathing hard, popping out of the other end of the straw, whatever you wanted to call it. She gained her feet, grabbed the woman’s hand a second time. She had the better of it, since the rest of their little group were sidealongs. She had to trust the others were doing just as well—had to trust that no inexperienced witch or wizard splinching the disapparation would make this a very short operation.</p><p>And then, hands locked in the ultimate gesture of trust from one witch to another, they tore their way through reality a second time.</p><p>And then a third. Buildings loomed around them, silent and dark and profoundly unnatural. The moon seemed obscured above. Vines grew along the walls, and the cracks in the pavement were filled with grass.</p><p>Hermione felt so ill, so intensely ill, and so ill at ease, too. <em>You’re here, </em>she thought, it drove home for her—where she was, what she was to do. But she staggered to her feet and snapped a salute to the young witch.</p><p>And then she was gone, with the rest of the infiltration force. Left behind—Larissa, Master Flyorov… Luna, Tonks. Ron.</p><p>Ron, like Hermione, had remained on his feet. He took two steps over, and clapped her shoulder. “Come on, ‘Mione, we’ve got to move out fast.”</p><p>She spun with him to the others, helping them up. They were surrounded by abandoned apartment blocks: The ghost city of Pripyat. And they had to take cover fast, before the Morsmordre was there to hunt for them.</p><p>Larissa helped Flyorov along, and flashed her a thumbs-up.</p><p>But the ghostly silence seemed to close in all around. There were plenty of places on Earth that were more terrifying. But perhaps nothing else quite so <em>eerie. </em>Every hair of her body stood on hand, and they made haste through a tangled maze of ruined and abandoned apartments, filled with goods left behind.</p><p>Distantly, in that utter stillness and silence, they could hear the snap of a group apparating in.</p><p>They were already being hunted.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>They’d all already cast all the concealment charms they could, focused on magical detection, not physical. For a moment, there was silence in the small group. They stood on the second floor of one of the apartment blocks, in the stairwell, where they could easily cover against anyone coming up. Master Flyorov was badly out of breath, and still sick from the chain apparations. Larissa, having helped him that far, leaned on the wall, forcing her breaths to be slow and deep to steady her heartrate.</p><p>Tonks and Luna covered them from behind. Hermione—looked across the stairwell, at Ron. “They don’t know we’re here. We keep moving deeper into the city, toward the reactor, they’ll give up and go home eventually. They don’t know anyone is here. It’s just a routine counter-infiltration sweep to eliminate the possibilities for where the infiltrators went.”</p><p>“Rought. No magic until then.” Ron said it emphatically.</p><p>“Agreed. Alright, everyone, we’re going to take the fire escape and move into the next building. No excess noise. No magic. So, mask up.” She thought about asking Tonks for the reading from the Geiger counter, but she saw the former Auror had put it away. <em>Sensible. We need to move with the sole objective of evading detection, we can worry about the rads when we’re closer. A few hours in Pripyat won’t kill us … The reactor hall </em><em>will be </em><em>another matter entirely. </em>The thoughts passed quickly through her as she brought the PMK-2 gas mask up and over her face. Her vision restricted, her breath was hot on the skin of her face, like some kind of alien caress. She pulled the straps taut, and checked the fit. The others did the same, and then it was time to go—they could afford no waiting, no resting, nothing.</p><p>They hastened on, deeper into the city, breathless and quiet. Footfalls of boots on long-rotted carpets, on long-cracked concrete, were the only sound of their presence, and they were all under a <em>Muffliato </em>charm—but no more magic was cast, nothing more to alert the enemy. They would have to trust that their current protections were adequate. An active use of magic might quickly bring attention against them. They had to assume that the enemy was very skilled in counterinsurgency operations.</p><p>The trees growing through what had once been grass made it easy to avoid the enemy. Each rustle of a leaf, each footfall, contained two dangers. The radiation they might be exposed to was combined with the risk of alerting the enemy. They tracked their way through the forests, approaching what was from the map one of the disposal sites. There, they’d have to cross the railway tracks. They paused by what at first seemed to be a laager of vehicles, but was really a great field of abandoned equipment. Beyond, dark against a dark sky, was the Sarcophagus. They were about half a kilometre from the railway tracks. It would be more than a kilometre beyond them in turn to reach that horrifying dark shape, looming up in the dark along the river.</p><p>Hermione grabbed her water bottle and attached it through the special top to the gas mask. With a snap of a bayonet lock, it was in place, and she could drink clean water without losing her protective seal. Larissa stepped up to her. “We’re definitely clear far enough we can take a reading.”</p><p>Hermione unhooked the bottle from her mask, relieved from even a single gulp of water, and nodded. Securing it back to her belt, she picked up the Geiger counter instead. It screamed, but not as horribly as she had feared. “Fifty röntgens per hour.” Which wasn’t terrible, but they were also still two klicks from the sarcophagus. It was horrifying to think that it hadn’t been maintained at all in six years, something that was abstractly bad even in the briefings, but now seemed ominous in the extreme when you could actually look at the rust-streaked greying mass, taking on the appearance of some ruin of an ancient temple to a Dark God, in the depths of the Pripyet marsh on this strange night. Not until they were sure they were not being pursued (or, she supposed, it didn’t matter anymore) could she stretch out and try to use her power to shield them, the way Bellatrix had shown.</p><p>And then there was a light. They all froze in place as it cut ahead of them, a thin stabbing beam in the dark. Luna dashed ahead of the others as Ron and Hermione covered her on the right, Tonks and Larissa on the left. She scrambled up the embankment to the tracks, and looked off, down to the southwest, pressed low to the ground, small and lithe and in their camo fatigues, invisible against the ballast and the lush vegetation that grew in short thickets along the tracks.</p><p>She raised one hand, and signed. <em>Train. </em></p><p><em>They must have reactivated the line to bring troops and supplies to the front, </em>Hermione realised. The railway from Chernogov to Ovruch ran right through the exclusion zone, but through-traffic had been abandoned after the Incident. However, the Morsmordre certainly cared nothing for the consequences of running trains through the exclusion zone. She was able to signal Luna to fall back when there was a sharp report down the line, from the direction of the train. Hermione tensed in fear, shot a look to Luna, horrified that she’d see the strange woman shot, but then realised there had been a flash.</p><p>
  <em>A Torpedo. </em>
</p><p>Someone was warning the train to stop. The squeal of metal on metal from the brakes grinding the rust off of the ill-used rails echoed down the line. Luna slid back down the embankment, and then dashed back toward the group. “The wizards hunting us decided they wanted to talk to the train driver,” Luna explained distantly. “I don’t think they’re going to leave.”</p><p>The tension closed in on them. They only had so much time. The masks were damned uncomfortable, but absolutely necessary to avoid detection spells.</p><p>Tonks cursed softly. “We can’t cross the tracks in the light. They’ll run along slowly, looking for any sign of us.”</p><p>“I wonder if they reactivated the track protection circuits,” Luna idly mused, rambling about something that was utterly irrelevant—probably learned when she was on an armoured train—and seemed a perfect distraction.</p><p>“I can tell if they did,” Hermione murmured. She had an idea suddenly—because Luna’s offhand strange comments always meant something, and the track protection circuits…</p><p>“Tonks, get everyone into an approach position to dash off.”</p><p>“...Mione?”</p><p>“Just do it. Please.” She started off toward the tracks, jogging until she got close enough that the trees no longer screened her. There she dropped down to her bell, and crawled up through the brush and the ballast toward the track. There she could see the figures of the Morsmordre wizards who were sweeping Pripyat, talking to the train driver. They appeared as giant shadows, cast by the bright beam of the locomotive’s headlamp, and flickering as they moved around and talked where they had brought the train to a stop with a signal torpedo.</p><p>The ability to apparate meant they could quickly obtain almost limitless magical reinforcements if they had the cause to. Hermione could not let them have the cause. That locomotive was certainly very old, and like anything else captured from the Russian or Ukrainian governments, left in as poor condition as possible when the Morsmordre overran it, and likely maintained with few spare parts for the past several years.</p><p>The track circuit was a low voltage current run through the track to warn of any block in the line. An object crossing both tracks would automatically turn the signals to danger. So would a gap in one of the rails at any point. Hermione extended her wand, and summoned the electric magic that Bellatrix had taught her. “<em>Revealio wave.” </em> She could feel the low voltage current humming in her wand. <em>So it’s there. </em></p><p><em>Fuck. Luna’s always right. </em>Hermione grinned despite herself. The next spell was another part of the electric magic that Bellatrix had taught her. Synchronise your magic with the wave—and it would not be clear to anyone that it was magic. With luck, the spells the enemy used—she wanted to call them snatchers, though unfortunately they were a far cry from that—just wouldn’t appreciate this magic which lapped around them like the rise and fall of the sea.</p><p>So, next, she took advantage of the fact there were metal rails, metal wheels, a metal locomotive…</p><p><em>Ah, yes, there you go… </em>Her wand shifted, gently.</p><p>The headlamp on the locomotive went out.</p><p>Tonks needed no prompting to get everyone moving, as Hermione lunged up from cover and tamped her boots down on the rotting sleepers, then scrambled down the other side, her wand out to cover her friends if the entire plan went south. She could hear cursing down the line from the direction of the locomotive, still dimly lit by side-lights.</p><p>One after the other, Larissa helping Flyorov across until only Ron remained, they lunged across the tracks, down the other side, and into cover again. Ron made the trip last. They had shelter in piles of abandoned equipment, but none of them wished to linger. Ahead, the decaying fence had been torn open by animals, and entry into the final perimeter around the old Nuclear Power Plant was a trivial affair.</p><p>Behind them, the light on the locomotive snapped back on again, the fused wire having been repaired. With shouts and the harsh whine of the diesel engine, it slowly got back underway.</p><p>In front of them, an office-building which had been used by the administration and security personnel even during the era of the “Liquidators”, abandoned only when the site was overrun by the Morsmordre, loomed. Another safe shelter. Mostly safe.</p><p>If Pripyat was a memorial to a vanished country and a vanished era, this building was a memorial to a time most people would kill for now, in a country still fighting for survival. The signs, the check-in sheets, the maps and plans, the abandoned radios and televisions, they all hinted at that world which Hermione had only seen in the summer, when home with her parents from Hogwarts—the world of muggles, in the mid-90s, when the future seemed so much different than the one that they lived in now.</p><p>Taking cover inside the buildings, in the abandoned monument to an earlier abandonment, they listened to the sound of the locomotive passing by. They could not eat, they could not rest. Just drink water and trust that would be enough.</p><p>The locomotive passed on down and onto the bridge with its train. The outside world faded away into this strange tomb of technological civilisation. A tomb where Flyorov said that the very boundaries of the magical and technological worlds bled together.</p><p>When they headed back out of the office building to advance toward the Sarcophagus, it seemed terrifyingly true, primeval, real. The dark marsh all around, welcoming them with a power of a dark life, which laughed at the radiation in the exclusion zone, and had come back to claim a world without humans. One klick along a road to Hell. One klick to deconstruct technological civilisation—to descend into the terrifying madness of the power on the other side of those ailing walls, where somewhere inside, magic, creation and history laughed at the works and feats and pretensions of humanity.</p><p>Now they passed through the last set of security perimeter fencing with a few quick, non-persistent spells. Their destination was obvious, even in the very depth of night. The abandoned ruins of the Reactor No.4 control centre beckoned to them, as they entered the building itself. Now, they had to be confident enough to use spells, spells modified from a <em>scourgify </em>to constantly keep their skin clean of the outside influence—of any kind of particulate—bubble-headed charm to trap outside air against them for the next hours, because filtered masks would not necessarily be sufficient.</p><p>It all felt so terribly inadequate, even if the intellect screamed at the whimpering heart, that it could be done, it could be done <em>right, </em>and thousands of people had worked here, for shifts longer than they would endure, and gotten the very job done of building this sarcophagus.</p><p>And so with those maudlin thoughts, they stood in a monument to muggle hubris. Involuntarily, Hermione grinned. Bellatrix would have said something absolutely amazing then—and possibly very irritating. She promised herself if she made it out alive that she’d share this memory with her lover via pensieve.</p><p>Tonks’ hair was pitch black. Hermione couldn’t even remember seeing that before. She stepped, slowly, her boots crunching on the ruins of the room. Looked around one more time at the abandoned equipment. Faced Flyorov.</p><p>The old professor stood with a haunted look, thirty years of living life past a horrible night having come back to him.</p><p>“Vasily Gregorovich,” Tonks said, very gently. “Best for us to hurry.”</p><p>He shook his head, laughed once, in acknowledgement of how obvious that statement was. “Alright then. This way.” he gestured, his own wand again firm in the grip of his hand, down the corridor that led toward the entombed remains of the reactor. The sarcophagus was in their way, but if you wanted to use magic to get to hell faster, there were <em>plenty </em> of opportunities for <em>that. </em></p><p>And then, back toward the building entrance, that heard a sharp crack of apparation.</p><p>Hermione closed her eyes for a half-second, gripped her wand at the ready. <em>They got us, anyway.</em></p><p>“Come on, no more time!” Tonks yelled, and pressed forward.</p><p>As they ran forward, Hermione turned on the Geiger counter. The skittering sound it made of the continuous field of background radiation descending on them, trying to get through their magic to destroy them—and far too successful at it—seemed like the perfect soundtrack for a battle in Hell. But it was also a warning to their enemies, because Hermione stretched out with the electric magic for her shields, just like Bellatrix had taught her. She brought up the wave-forms from her magical core, and she began to turn the radiation aside, even as the field peaked around them.</p><p>Their pursuers had no such protection.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Notes:</p><p>1. The exchange in Russian could be idiomatically translated something like this:</p><p>“Ni pukha ni pera.” - "Don't catch anything." (literally -- 'neither fur nor feather'.)<br/>“ke chortu!” - "To hell with that!"</p><p>2. I use the spelling Pripyet for the marsh, and Pripyat for the abandoned city. This is purely an idiosyncratic distinction; one is the Russian spelling, one is Ukrainian. I suppose I am saying that the marsh is essentially Russian at some level (cultural, if you will); or known to the Russian language, whereas now Pripyat is on Ukrainian territory and well, that's the proper name. </p><p>3. PMK-2 is the standard gas mask of the Russian Army in the 90s -- a "bayonet lock" is the particular fitting that you insert a water bottle into and securely fasten to avoid the admission of contaminants into the breathing space. You can then drink through the mask.</p><p>4. I think I've mentioned this before, but a torpedo is basically a small pyrotechnic railways used to common use as a warning signal; placed on the tracks the noise of the report and the train being shaken is a signal for the train to stop.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0089"><h2>89. The Hut on Chicken Legs</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They scrambled through the reactor complex, knowing that their pursuers were only moments behind. The sarcophagus was not a complete solid containment structure. It was meant to protect the surrounding environment. Go deep enough into the sub-levels of the reactor, it was quite possible to find ways to approach the core itself. It was exactly what Flyorov and his now dead comrades had done during the incident. It was where the Soviet scientists had kept penetrating in expeditions during the construction of the Sarcophagus, which had led to the discover of the horrifying new mineral, “Corium,” in 1991. Down the stairs, into the basement of the reactor, where the pumps remained, where the lower ‘biological shield’ had collapsed under the force of the explosion above it, as the reactor itself detonated…</p><p>The geometry of death mattered for everything. Looking through lenses of a gas mask threatening to fog, sometimes the detector read only 5 röntgens an hour. Other times, it peaked at 250 röntgens an hour and Hermione screamed “<em>Run faster!”</em> Once, it hit one thousand.</p><p><em>Slytherins are taught to look for the advantage. This is insane. Madness. </em>“Lara, cover me!”</p><p>“...’Mione?!” The woman stopped short and spun back. She knew what the screech from the radiation detector meant, too. One thousand röntgens...</p><p>Hermione flung herself back, to face the ongoing enemy. “One thousand röntgens! We’re at One thousand röntgens<em>!” </em>She figured they were slytherins, or like them culturally, they had to be crack wizards and witches to be given this duty, and trusted, too… <em>Don’t you realise that it’s in your best interest to run while you’ve still got a fucking chance? </em></p><p>But it was Hermione’s magic that sustained the protective field for their own group, that wavered and surged with the effort, that was protecting them to an unknown level of efficacy, that might be risking a lethal dose right now; one had only minutes at one thousand röntgens.</p><p>The enemy had none, they had minutes to win or die in, and they were exquisitely vulnerable. But so was Hermione, if she couldn’t shift to a shield to protect herself from the first attack…</p><p>But it was Larissa who caught it, turned and twisted it first. She stood there, a defiant friend, worried at the pause, but uncaring of anything but standing at Hermione’s side.</p><p><em>Fuck, all these people are too good for me, </em>Hermione thought in wonder. The rest of the team hopefully was around another corner, where the radiation levels dropped off again.</p><p>And she was surprised, and yet not surprised at all, to see Millicent Bulstrode, relying on a bubble-head charm, charging forward in the robes of a Morsmordre Auror, as built as a woman who played rugby, as hefty and powerful as a man as she had developed in her twenties. Tracey Davis, blonde and delicate and with an expression that was absolutely terrified, followed her at the head of their squad.</p><p>“<em>ONE THOUSAND, YOU IDIOTS!” </em>Hermione repeated again. It was Larissa who shielded her from the <em>Sectumsempra </em>that went tearing from Millicent’s wand.</p><p>“Mudblood bitch, <em>you’re </em>here!” She snapped another offensive spell off, but Larissa was well-poised to block it too. “<em>Attack, damn you</em>!” Millicent screamed back at the rest of her squad, and they snapped out their wands. She had dragged this part of the counterinsurgency team down here, against all sense or sanity, and now they were in for a penny, in for a pound. They prepared for a battle, while the rad detectors screamed and skittered.</p><p>The distraction, though, was already terminal. Stumbling through the darkness, with only wands and torches for illumination, they had not been prepared for the wave of green light which sickeningly reflected off of the rust-streaked and dirt-covered walls. The shouted words: “<em>Avada kedavra</em>!”</p><p>The way that Millicent was slammed back and collapsed into one of the walls, instantly dead.</p><p>Ron, standing there.</p><p>“It’s Strelkov! Fall back! Fall back!” Tracey exclaimed, looking to Hermione with an expression of terrified relief, like she were genuinely thankful to her enemy for warning her how utterly horrifying it was.</p><p>And then Ron’s wand flicked again. <em>“Bombarda Maxima!”</em></p><p>He aimed not at anyone, but at the ceiling above and beyond them as they fell back. The corridor exploded in a gust of collapsing concrete and metal, shearing and straining and screaming.</p><p>They couldn’t let them escape, after all. Not really, not if Hermione wanted it or not. She thought she might well have killed Millicent if she had had the chance, but… <em>My God. </em>Her magic flowed through her, keeping the radiation shield going. Larissa had know compunctions, tearing into the trapped team with a savage set of cutting spells alongside Ron. The others clustered around.</p><p>Hermione couldn’t use her wand, it was already busy, but she drew her pistol in her off-hand, and the crack echoed through the corridors. Blood dripped down from the lifeless body of Tracey Davis, entombed forever in this mystical hell, where technology and humanity’s deepest fears dripped and mixed together, like the blood and the radioactive dust in the hall. There had been no point in deterring them by trying to get them to leave. Ron was right.</p><p>Killing them was the only option. It always had been.</p><p>She holstered the pistol and inclined her head to him.</p><p>For a fraction of a second, of a hint of old Ron was there, relieved that she appreciated what he had done. Then it was gone. “Let’s go,” he snapped. “We don’t have any time left at all down here.”</p><p>“No we don’t.” Flyorov spoke up then, turning back down the corridor. “No we don’t.” He didn’t sound tired, but it seemed very final and very certain nonetheless. They hastened down another flight of stairs, twisted and melted under extreme heat. The very bottom of the sub-levels. There seemed to be a faint glow in the air.</p><p><em>There’s no way it could still be ionizing the air, </em>Hermione thought in a horrified grimness. There was a breathless, chilled silence from everyone. One more corner, and there was …</p><p>It was <em>half-filled </em>with Corium, halfway from floor to ceiling, through the holes melted in the ceiling above… The only reason it hadn’t melted further, was the liquid nitrogen that had been pumped into the ground below, thanks to the heroic efforts of the miners, and here they were, face to face, with the radioactive lava, solidified into strange shapes, like they stood inside of a lava tube next to a volcano, looking at the aftermath of fire.</p><p>But where lava was solid, you had a chance to live. Here… “What is the glow? Master Flyorov? It can’t be ionizing the air, it can’t still be ionizing the air.”</p><p>“It can’t, it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that. When I came, when I first came… The Corium was flowing down. But it still glowed, you see… they’re buried in there, Miss Granger. My comrades are buried in there. Under it. That’s where they fell… where I fell. Trying to stop it from melting through. To buy time for the miners...” He wanted to say more, but his words failed him; perhaps there was nothing good to say. He just stared at the place where, a bit less than two decades before, he had laid down his life with his friends.</p><p>Hermione stared in blank horror. But Flyorov was not frozen; she watched the man raise his wand, and begin to speak, an incantation in a language older than old, a Slavic tongue of times past, an appeal to water and earth. The glow in the air shifted and curled around them. The light faded, their wands’ light faded, the torches blinked out—pitch blackness, except for the faint blue glow. The room faded, the walls faded, the Corium faded, the world faded into nothingness and blackness. The last thing she saw was Luna start forward, walking toward the Corium. Hermione wanted to stop her, desperately wanted to stop her, didn’t think her shield could hold, didn’t know if her shield really was holding, if Bellatrix’s magic of waves and electricity was really protecting them nearly enough for them to walk out of this hell alive. She opened her mouth, but the world became blank, and she could not beg Luna to stop, she could not open her mouth to speak. The darkness closed in, totally, utterly, until sensation itself seemed to flee. The sound of the dosimeter going off, still skittering, still screeching, still warning, was the last sound, until everything faded away.</p><p>It was like the womb of the Earth—the stillness of the grave. Hermione felt like she had forgotten how to breathe, and maybe she really had.</p><p>Was there a faint glow ahead? Was she alone? She felt alone. She felt perfectly alone.</p><p>There was no way they could succeed. The Baba Yaga would not save them. They had come here based on the memory of one man, they were going to die, they were already dying, these were the thoughts that you had in the moment before you die …</p><p><em>Bellatrix, I love you. Use Nagini and find a way to win, </em>she forced herself to think, feeling no pain, feeling nothing at all, she used her last thought, thankful to think it, furious that it stretched on forever, like it would never end. Was this death? Was it like falling into a black hole? Was she going to keep thinking like this forever, never quite reaching the end of her thoughts? She wondered if she should try, with a last burning synapse, to will her magical core into some fantastical act of magical suicide, just to end it all, end it now, rather than be trapped here forever, feeling thought and the mind fade away, fade away, fade away…</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Hermione stirred to a shake, and then another. Then, she felt her mask being pulled off. She blinked, and blinked, and her mind returned to her with a jolt, but everything the night before seemed like a fog, like a dream, like a moment that had not really happened at all. Her eyes opening—the light surged in, hurting them, she frantically closed them. <em>Wait, the night before? Isn’t it still night? </em>But it wasn’t. Who was above her? She cupped her hands, and cracked one eye.</p><p>
  <em>Tonks. </em>
</p><p>“Uhhm. Tonks. Where are we?”</p><p>“Black spruce forest. Like in the far north,” Tonks answered, eyes green, wide, nervous, hair red. <em>She’s never looked more Celtic. Or more like she’s impersonating a Weasley.</em></p><p>She pushed herself up, and like Tonks had, quickly worked to remove the outer layer of protective CBRN cloak and other things which might have gained contamination. She felt an incredible relief when she saw Luna’s wonderful flaxen blonde hair spill out of her mask and cloak and couldn’t for the life of her understand why she was so terrified for Luna, only able to dimly remember the details of the confused moment in the very depths of the Reactor Building…</p><p><em>Is my wand going to be radioactive? </em>She wondered, with a moment of panic, even as another part of her was relieved that she was alive to worry about such stupid, mundane things.</p><p>Luna started walking almost immediately, toward a gentle rustling, that Hermione realised was a brook, as she pushed herself up with an inordinate amount of concern toward the slightly younger witch. And then, beyond the creek, she saw the clearing in the forest, and –</p><p>Master Flyorov, standing before it, offering a polite little bow.</p><p>The hut with chicken legs.</p><p>Of course, she had hoped, she had even been confident, until the exhausting process of descending into the reactor and the fight had stripped every bit of hope out of her body and left her with nothing but the dim feeling of disoriented, not-quite-there memories that she had left, slowly firming up in some ways, and in others, lurking at the edge of her memory and refusing to coming out, as if she had walked down into a cave filled with monsters instead of a ruined building filled with the melted remnants of a nuclear reactor core—was that what had happened? Had there been monsters down there? Snakes, bears, elephants, magical creatures, harpies trying to tear her apart? Could she quite remember which it had been?</p><p>The uncertainty was terrifying, and for the first time, a cold hand of fear came across her heart, and caught, and squeezed, and suggested that this too was part of the dream, and she was laying on the floor of the steam distribution corridor, dying? One more last memory?</p><p><em>If you live an entire life while dying in the blink of an eye, how is that any different than death, or living? Which is which? Wouldn’t one be just as real as the other? </em>She pursed her lips, and putting her hand on the bark of one of the trees, felt it warm and real and reassuring. Then she carried on, stepping carefully over the stream, not wanting to contaminate it with her boots, even with the coverlets over them they had worn removed and left on the earth behind them. A brief flash of a thought—that it was awful to contaminate this random, beautiful spot where a powerful goddess waited, with anything at all.</p><p>But Flyorov had come here two decades before, when the situation was much worse.</p><p>They formed up together into a knot, and carried on behind Flyorov toward the clearing. There was nothing in the forest, in the grass, or in the creek to suggest anything abnormal. Instead, in front of them the hut was deceptive, it might have been a normal structure, if you did not glance down, did not see the twitching, eager chicken legs, that perhaps, just perhaps, wanted to leap away and run, by whatever guiding force made the hut live, or have a simulcra of life.</p><p>They reached it, and a rope ladder hung down. Hermione started. <em>Was that there a moment ago? Was it really? </em>She couldn’t tell, she couldn’t be quite sure. And she wanted to tell Luna not to climb it, but of course Luna was already climbing it.</p><p>Larissa was more composed than she was, apparently. Her friend dashed forward, first, to join Luna. “You should have someone with you who has the ‘Russian scent’, my friend,” Larissa said to Luna kindly, staying close enough that Luna’s heels nearly nipped her on the ladder. Flyorov followed them.</p><p>When Hermione got to the top, she stared. Though it had seemed like just a minute, Luna was already sitting down, with a cup of rich smelling tisane of herbs in front of her. The hut was much larger on the inside than it was on the outside.</p><p>The immensely ancient crone with her long sharp nose and ears and exaggerated features was dressed in old robes. At first, nothing seemed unusual, though her nails were so long and at the corner of the eye, they seemed like razor-sharp claws, but just like overgrown nails, if you looked directly at them. A fire roared and the interior was quite comfortably warm, there was a cauldron over it, and there were boughs and branches on the walls, drying.</p><p>The crone. The crone.</p><p>Hermione was drawn back to her face. There was something in it, under the tufts and hanging tendrils of grey hair, that was indescribable and nerve-wracking. She stood before Flyorov and Larissa, she had both their backs to the wall. “<em>You </em>have the Russian scent,” the Baba Yaga spoke, addressing them with a curl of bemusement seeming faint in a rasping cold voice.</p><p>“Why did you bring these foreigners to me?”</p><p>“I wished to return, to ask for the Water of Death, Your Exaltedness,” Flyorov answered. “It was promised to me. And we all have need of it, for the sake of the Russian land.”</p><p>“hnnh…” A long fingernail pricked against Larissa’s neck, as the Baba Yaga’s beady eyes swept from one to another. “What does the Russian land need the Water of Death for?” She withdrew, and stepped over to where Luna drank her tea, leaning down. “Dearie, you are enjoying it?” The Baba asked, fingernails stroking through Luna’s hair.</p><p>The blonde’s head bobbed in agreement. “Thank you,” she said with a genuine, innocent smile, unimpacted by whom she was addressing.</p><p>Hermione wasn’t surprised at all.</p><p>Then she realised—Luna must have been there a while when she climbed up the ladder only a bare moment before, and yet, Ron and Tonks had not arrived yet… <em>What’s going on!?</em></p><p>The Baba Yaga, without quite turning, wagged a finger at her. “Don’t think so loud. Time moves here as I please it, not you. My house.”</p><p>Tonks and Ron finally arrived. The Baba turned toward them for a moment, Ron’s eyes widening as he froze in place “Hmf. More people without a Russian scent. You’ve led an invasion of my home, Vasily Gregorovich.”</p><p>“Forgive me, Your Exaltedness…”</p><p>“You know,” the Baba turned back to Luna, and smelled her hair. “Mmmnn.” Then she turned and approached Hermione, looked her over. Hermione stayed very still, very close to the door, to the wall. The Baba looked at her for a moment, then peeled away to poke Tonks in the stomach with a soft cackle. “You, my dear, will be back someday. Old, old, what’s in you, that’s something real…” She puttered back toward Hermione, reaching for her broom.</p><p>“Let me say, clever one, that you have a little bit of this land in you after all. A little bit of the scent. I was wrong the first time.” She smiled, a hideous thing.</p><p>Hermione decided plain honesty was the only way to deal with a Goddess, however strange of one that they faced right then and there. “I’m not Russian by blood.”</p><p>“Oh no, oh no, you’re not,” she agreed, starting to sweep. “So much dust… Yes you see, you’re not Russian by blood, and you can’t become Russian by living here, or by learning the language, those things are not enough, not enough alone.” She spun around with a spry and wiry strength and supple quickness that was impossible in a body like her’s, and used it to lightly tap Hermione in the stomach with the handle of the broom, watching her tense up. She then tapped the others, too. “But you <em>bled… </em>Suffered. Fought. That <em>does </em>count for something. You have left a little bit of yourselves in my soil!”</p><p>Hermione felt, abruptly, an intense surge of emotion, and she reached to her eyes to wipe at that, crying without thinking about it. She felt complimented and hollow all at once, at all the years of war. It was true, she could never leave that behind, she would carry something of it within her forever. She was <em>proud </em>to be marked by what she had experienced here.</p><p>“You will carry a bit of us in you, when you go back to your Gramarye,” the Baba mused, and stepped up, and with a long fingernail, stole some of the tears from Hermione’s cheek, and she could only watch in curious awe, while they still fell, as the fingertip was extended up to the Baba’s lips, and she tasted them.</p><p>“Hmmn.”</p><p>“So, we’ll be allowed to go to bring Harry back?” Luna asked pleasantly, looking up from her tea.</p><p>“Child, the Water of Death doesn’t work quite that way. Vasily Gregorovich could just as well bring back your father,” the Baba laughed.</p><p>“Well, he’s happy right now,” Luna answered with a diffident disinterest in the subject. “But surely you must know about the Boy Who Lived.”</p><p>“I know all about the lessons that have been taught, in how prophecies create themselves,” the Baba replied, and at last, returned to Flyorov’s side, and left Luna to ponder that one. “Your children are well?”</p><p>“The ones who live, Your Exaltedness,” he replied, flatly, and with a tired voice. “Such is war.”</p><p>“Such is war,” she repeated the words, like she were tasting them. Then, moved on without another thought, acknowledging, but not dwelling upon, the anguish the question brought to Flyorov. He had not brought up his children before--with good reason. The Baba Yaga moved on. Another question. “Your wife?”</p><p>“Busy, on the front.”</p><p>“Hmm! Will you level the debt with Merlin’s Gramarye for these little shavings of these souls that I have got?”</p><p>Hermione felt a little bit of a chill at the question, but Flyorov merely nodded, and smiled, a perfectly dignified old gentleman, a gentleman of the <em>soul. </em>Such men were born, not made, and their class did not matter, they were gentlemen regardless of their money or status or power. “Of course.”</p><p>The Baba Yaga looked at him, and looked, and nodded once as if acknowledging at last that she were satisfied with his statement. There was something about the exchange, about how it was said, about what was said, that was incredibly significant, that scared Hermione, but she could not pin what it was, or why.</p><p>The Baba shuffled over to one of the windows, this one not open to the forest beyond, but the shutters closed like they were in an old house in winter. “Hmm, hmmm,” she was mumbling to herself, taking a ceramic jar off one of the shelves. She opened the window…</p><p>“Hold your breath!” Flyorov suddenly ordered all of them, in a tone that brooked no disobedience.</p><p>On the other side of the window a waterfall was pouring past it. The Baba reached out with the ceramic jar. Hermione realised, in a moment, that to inhale the mist, the vapour, the haze of the water off that waterfall, would be instant death. That was the meaning of the warning.</p><p>To the Baba it was nothing, and she filled the jar and sealed it and closed the window—and all the mist disappeared like it had never been there at all. But the sealed jar, she thoroughly wiped clean, and dribbled wax from a candle against the stone lid, and then presented it to Flyorov. “Vasily Gregorovich, you have the boon I promised you.”</p><p>“Your Exaltedness.” He bowed deeply as he took the jar.</p><p>She laughed, and turned back away to her cauldron. “Now out with you all, I am an old woman and I grow tired—and bored!”</p><p>Suddenly Hermione felt a terrible pressure, a terrible power, a fatigue pressing in around her. With the others, she staggered to the ladder, and made her way down, barely keeping her feet. Only Master Flyorov, in a reverse of his health, seemed sprightly, descending the ladder at last. Hermione got a faint sense that he had exchanged some last words with the Baba Yaga, but she could not make them out.</p><p>“Let’s find where we are,” he instructed them, but they staggered along in a dazed haze, an uncertain fog, like that encounter had taken far longer than they had thought, like they had felt something essential taken from them by the encounter in the Hut With Chicken Legs.</p><p>Finally, hours later, they staggered out to a road and flagged down a passing truck, carrying wood harvested for fuel, including the wood alcohol it burned down for power. The astonished driver led to an equally astonished team, all except Flyorov and perhaps Larissa, who understood that the Hut moved, as it pleased.</p><p>They were some kilometres north of Sokol, in Vologda Oblast, in the vast north woods. And five days had passed, when it seemed like twelve hours.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0090"><h2>90. The Water of Life</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>No word from the Pripyet. Bellatrix woke up each morning and asked Narcissa through the Telecaster, and received an evasive, gently soothing answer which confirmed that Narcissa had no information good or bad, and regretted it. So there was nothing to be done.</p><p>Bellatrix bent to her work. She outmanoeuvred the defenders of Tordesillas in two days of rolling tank battles in the plains and fields to the north and northwest of the city, and slipped one division of the Black Guards to the west. Riding the wind like a bell, her tank columns converged on Torrecilla de la Abadesa to the west of Tordesillas proper and forced a crossing of the River Duero with windrows of corpses left along the banks in the lowlands, as tanks churned and clanked across the steel of the temporary bridges.</p><p>An old mill standing out in the middle of the river sat south of Torrecilla, and she established her next headquarters there, to send her tanks screaming east across undefended ground to encircle Valladolid from the south, in a building standing in the midst of the rushing river since medieval times. That was where she spent the night, before she stormed her way into Tordesillas.</p><p>She rode in a command track with Jorge, and wore thick riding gloves and a pair of goggles tossed up over her forehead, and a long, light riding duster to keep the carpet of rolling dust from the tanks off of her uniform and magical armour, which hung down to the ankles of her boots in an amusing reminder of just how short this woman, with all her contemptuous swaggering intensity, really was. No longer caring to cover the golden left forearm, she let glints of it appear as she shrugged and gestured with her left arm, until the dust they rode through carpeted it, and reduced its glittering down to the dull glint of bronze.</p><p>Once, it had been Bellatrix who lived completely within the magical world. She knew nothing of tanks or nuclear reactors or massed industrial war or muggle parliamentary politics. She had grown up in a perfectly magical upbringing. Then, Thérèse had shown her a world of smokey cafés, mixed drinks, electric guitars, the oscillating waves of the acoustical art which seemed like a different kind of magic to her. She had tried to understand what the muggles had done, how those dirty creatures had stolen a march on wizarding-kind and mastered something which wizards had, at best, with the wizarding radio only vaguely approached a true understanding of.</p><p>And she’d succeeded.</p><p>In the end, her world consumed her. There was a dialectic magnificence in what had happened next, the decades of hell, torture, war, pureblood supremacy; Thérèse’s death at the very hand of the man she had been forced to marry to preserve her family’s honour and status, and the end of everything except an obsession with Voldemort that had grown to overcome her and ultimately to completely consume her sense and sanity and leave her with nothing—except for her beautiful, beautiful daughter Delphini, who was in fact everything, not nothing.</p><p>Her world consumed her, sent her to hell for fourteen years, and then spat her out with a daughter she loved and had to care for. That combination was immensely powerful. It began to drag her out of her obsessive yearning. It turned her against her Lord—it made her a traitress. It disillusioned her to the cause of Voldemort’s power.</p><p>It brought her to the thunderclap of a new encounter with Hermione Granger.</p><p>With the enemy falling back before them, they reached Tordesillas, and took the city without heavy fighting. There, she found herself in the monastery where Joanna the Mad of Castile had been imprisoned by her father and her own son. She felt an intense connection to this woman, who had in fact been a witch like her close relative Mary of England, but never properly trained, living on the cusp of the magical and technological worlds, torn apart by the aspirations of men.</p><p>Hermione had completed dragging her into this world, where muggle things were just as important as wizarding things. The world her daughter would grow up in, where magic and technology would exist hand in hand. A world where she had regained the love of her family.</p><p>Bellatrix wished well to Joanna the Mad’s soul, and carried on with her charge to the east. She had sent her feelers out to the Portuguese, couldn’t the wizards of the world see the madness, the danger from Voldemort that they were all under? Disturbing news from near Ararat, of vast armies of the dead and utterly powerful dark magic were swirling. Were they going to cow resistance, make people kiss the ring, or solidify a new period of resistance to his power?</p><p>Bellatrix gambled that Voldemort had no real loyalty left except for the other Death Eaters. That everyone was looking for a way out. That the reputation of his dark magical power and its relevance had been fading since the moment he invaded Russia.</p><p>But if he gained the full power at the bottom of Ararat, people would have good cause to kiss the ring, to remain loyal to Voldemort, to hold together his ramshackle Empire. Locking the Portuguese wizarding community into a path of ‘treason’ to Voldemort <em>before </em>then would be the best time to do it.</p><p>And in the back of her head, she was reminded that there was still no word from the Pripyet.</p><p>The dawn came up with the bright and wild hues of the sky that was still impregnated with dust from the nuclear exchanges. It was fabulously beautiful, a fantastical sky over the summer fields of Spain. Bellatrix tossed her clothes on and drank her soldier’s coffee and ate her food on the run, and joined Jorge at the command track. “The news?” She asked.</p><p>“We have been in communication, but there’s no cease-fire yet. I think they’ve also been in communication with the Portuguese, to see if they will cross the frontier to attack us in the rear. You’ve been reaching out to them, haven’t you, M’lady?”</p><p>“Yes, and they haven’t moved one way or another yet. If we take Valladolid we have the credibility to form a government in Spain no matter what. Men must realise that, and understand that if they do not switch sides now, they will never get another chance.” It helped that in Portugal and Spain, many of the wizarding elite had attended Beauxbatons. It had generally been a ‘light’ school, unlike Durmstrang, which meant that Central Europe was far more firmly for Voldemort than western Europe and southwestern Europe in particular was. There were men and women who would actually fight to the death for him across Central Europe; the loyalties in France and Spain and Portugal were much different. But at the same time, he had thoroughly purged the French, especially, which is why there wasn’t a croak of them switching sides, he had taken care to make sure that the usual support for the light in France was crushed. But in Spain and Portugal the situation was more complicated and less urgent, and so the defections were, by corollary, more possible. The muggle population would revolt at the drop of a hat, if they felt it would not be hopeless, Bellatrix was sure. All across Europe, they had to be feeling that way.</p><p>But it was only not hopeless if there were wizards and witches on their side. “Keep the pressure up until they crack,” Bellatrix said resolutely. “Forward!”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It was such a strange feeling to leave Vologda for Moskva and travel back to Britain, after all that had passed. Where did the dreams and hallucinations begin and where did the truth begin? Where did they end? They had met a Goddess, but a very strange one, who was never quite worshipped, but only propiated, and remembered in legend and in myth.</p><p>At least now, Moskva as a city was continuing to recover. It was a good summer, and food rationing had been relaxed as the first harvest came in after the recovery of the south and the eastern Ukraine. The situation was not as bleak as it could have been, arriving by rail, with time for a meal and tea, and to change into new uniforms, which were provided by the Military Commissariat.</p><p>At last arriving in the city, after a delay to let a few troop trains pass, they went forthwith to MinKol headquarters from the railway station by tram and trolleybus, heading for the international portkey hub which had been reestablished at the MinKol headquarters. Places like Delhi, Tehran, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Nanjing and, of course, London, were once again available, but all of the travellers were witches and wizards in MinKol and allied Ministries, and also muggle military personnel who were on such important missions that they were given an escort from MinKol and allowed to travel instantaneously like this.</p><p>In the waiting hall, with its little canteen serving tea and simple food, Hermione was astonished to see Tamar Dadiani. She knew, of course, that Master Flyorov and his wife had a relationship that seemed very happy and close enough, but they were also comfortable being apart, and Lady Dadiani was an important part of the Georgian contribution to the War Effort. Her presence was a considerable gesture of affection, the moreso that she approached her husband outright, and embraced him with an intense kiss. “Vasya.” She pulled him away from the others.</p><p>Ron glanced at the time, and got in line for some tea. If he had any questions, he kept them to himself.</p><p>Larissa pulled Hermione away, too.</p><p>“Lara?” Hermione asked, with the tug on her shoulder.</p><p>“I don’t have a good feeling about this.”</p><p>“Neither do I,” Hermione admitted plainly.</p><p>“I don’t like this,” Larissa continued, “In particularly, I don’t like the exchange between The Baba Yaga and Master Flyorov at all,” she said softly, her expression unusually fragile. She had borne so much pain and suffering in this war, with steadfast courage and her characteristic flippancy, her defiant intent to act absurd in the midst of the absurd horrors of the war—Larissa was rational and supremely fearless and never as disconnected as Luna, but in a way she <em>was </em>rather like Luna. Her encounter with Haldi and the Battle on Ararat had pushed that to the limit. Her romance with Draco had brought her back to something of her old self. Now she looked genuinely fearful and it broke Hermione’s heart.</p><p>“Draco will be there when we get back to London,” Hermione said, barely more than a whisper. “You can stay with him, if you like.”</p><p>“No, I’d <em>not </em>like that, I can’t leave Master Flyorov alone. I won’t. But, I would like very much for Draco to be with me, yes.”</p><p>“He will be,” Hermione insisted, and hugged her friend again. “Let me get you something nice.”</p><p>“If you can find something.”</p><p>In fact, Hermione found that the canteen had chocolate salami, which while it once would have been a very humble dessert for the likes of Larissa Naryshkina, now was a very welcome wartime snack. She managed a wry smile to Hermione. “Sorry. I know I’m not the one to get maudlin.”</p><p>“Everyone must be weak sometimes,” Hermione answered with a shrug. She’d certainly learned that herself, the hard way, many times over. Then, Tamar and Vasily returned.</p><p>They both looked like they’d be crying, but Tamar smiled grandly, and confidently. “We’re ready. Come this way, Councillors.”</p><p>“I suppose we all do have a variation on the same rank,” Tonks mumbled.</p><p>Off to the portkey with them. A single moment of magical intensity, and they were torn away from Russia and Moskva, deposited in London, the London which already had in the past days made enormous strides of recovering from the horrifying Day of the Dead.</p><p>And Draco was waiting, just like Hermione had assured her friend that he would be. Ginny was waiting, too, for both her and Ron, and she was so relieved to be back, even if, like a black claw, stretching from her heart, her mind took the moment to remind her exactly why she was here.</p><p>Andromeda was there, too, to lead them to Hogwarts, and to embrace her daughter, with all the furious intensity of a mother who had very nearly abandoned hope.</p><p>And remind her that Bellatrix wasn’t here. <em>You better be kicking ass, Bella. </em></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Of all the narcotics that Bellatrix had ever taken, experienced, or even fantasized about, of all the experiences that she had craved to reawaken emotion after her mind had been so savaged by the Dementors in Azkaban, there was sex with Hermione, and there was … This.</p><p>Liberating a city.</p><p>Valladolid.</p><p>What could compare to this emotion, to this scene, to this experience? A hundred thousand people lined the streets. They waved flags and they cheered and waved their hands high in the air. And around her, her troops, the Black Guards, the Galicians, cheered <em>her. </em>Their voices roared through the air and shook the glass around them alongside the rumbling of the tanks, that they strove to overcome with their wild screams. This grand city had once been the capital of Castile, and still had a certain royal grandeur which Madrid had never completely taken from her.</p><p>They arrived at last, for they could barely move through the sea of those celebrating, at the Plaza de Zorrilla, before the Campo Grande, the great triangular park at the heart of the old city. Her troops stretched straight out to the nearby Plaza Mayor, where the Holy Week processions were held. Jorge had a grin that was also flush with intensity, as the two of them dismounted from their Command Track, and made their way with a knot of escorts to the Plaza Mayor, facing the Town Hall—the Casa Consistorial--with its great clock-tower.</p><p>Together they approached the massive statue of Pedro Ansúrez which the Morsmordre administration had not bothered to destroy. Seeing it intact, Jorge was overcome by emotion, wiping at his eyes and staring silently for a moment.</p><p>“Since you can’t do it with a wand,” Bellatrix said with gentle bemusement, she reached over and took a bullhorn from one of their staff who had followed them, and presented it to him, “make due with something electro-acoustic, hmm?”</p><p>He took it, and laughed. “M’lady Field Marshal.” Tipping his hand in a salute, he jogged forward.</p><p>He was right. The promotion had been gazetted. She was Field Marshal Lady Black now.</p><p>Jorge climbed to the top of the clock tower, and began to speak. With a little wink, Bellatrix spun out a quick spell that grabbed the acoustic waves of his voice, and magnified them, booming, across the Plazas and the Campo Grande. She thrilled at the experience and felt genuinely good for her friend, savouring the intensity of the emotion, the strangeness of being delighted in the triumph of another, a muggle no less!</p><p>And speak he did. There was no prospect of a broadly recognised civilian government, so what he said next was a delicate matter, declaring Valladolid, to great cheering and screams, the provisional capital of Spain. He announced the formation of a Junta of National Salvation, carefully choosing the name to be the same as the temporary government of Portugal after the ‘74 Carnation Revolution, to avoid any negative connotations politically. He proclaimed the eternal alliance with Russia and Britain, but promised to restore Spanish greatness within the ironclad unity of three brothers that the Alliance represented.</p><p>Such talk might all be a vapour in a few years, but it was what was needed now.</p><p>And then he finished it with a slogan that also had to be carefully chosen. “<em>¡Adelante, España!</em>”</p><p>Bellatrix just leaned against the side of the statue’s plinth, and grinned. She had spent several evenings with him, saying the slogans, feeling them over for their tone and tenor. It was part of her natural ear that had led her into acoustics and then electric magic, and it was so simple and she had, strangely enough, loved it, and loved to see him there now.</p><p>One of her Aides-de-Camp came up and saluted. She acknowledged it and pushed herself fully to her feet. It was a short transcription of a message.</p><p>
  <em>We will meet in Tordesillas to discuss terms. </em>
</p><p>Bellatrix gripped it tightly and leapt, tossing her fist in the air with a devilish grin. To those around her she was just one more who was cheering at Jorge’s Pronouncement.</p><p>
  <em>I will have another front to give you when you get back, Hermione. Another victory. </em>
</p><p>It was a promise that she prayed the Pripyet would let her keep.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Andromeda let them embrace relatives and make their greetings. Then she spun on heel, and led them for the Floos. Hermione ached to ask her about Bellatrix—did Bellatrix know that she was back, that she was safe?--but it was clear that Andromeda was not allowing even a second to be wasted. She distributed the Floo powder. “Buchanan Manor. It’s the closest to Hogwarts along the rail-line. We have a special train waiting at the passing loop there.”</p><p>They each said the name in their turn, Andromeda leading them through. On the other side, Hermione was astonished to see Daphne Greengrass, looking pretty, blonde, confident and dapper in the uniform of a British Army Major. She came to attention smartly and saluted Hermione and the others. “Ladies, Gentlemen, Officers, welcome. We have a train laid on for you, this way.” Several guards fell in with Daphne.</p><p>Ron fell in with Hermione. He glared for a moment, and then confided in her, with his voice a hoarse whisper: “All these snakes, ‘Mione. Greengrass turned her cloak from Voldemort to us in Glasgow during the liberation, and that was early enough that, of course, Narcissa pardoned her and gave her a commission. But she’s not the slightest bit different than Millicent, just a better sense of timing.”</p><p>Hermione suspected she knew what was behind it. “Andy is a snake too, Ron. And she’s always been with us.”</p><p>“Wouldn’t fight for us, though.”</p><p><em>Would you fight Ginny? </em> Hermione wanted to ask, but decided it best not to start a screaming row, when they were on this mission, of all things. To Hermione, Daphne reminded her far too much of Tracey, now entombed forever in Chernobyl. The thought gave her a shudder, and she was glad that <em>some </em>of the Slytherin students at Hogwarts from her days, as awful as they had all treated her, had made the right decision. There was nothing wrong with Daphne being alive.</p><p>They walked through the thistle and forest of a Scottish summer in the Highlands, and came out of the woods around the manor, descending toward the cut that the railway ran through, where as promised, on the passing loop off to the side of the single-track main, a smart LMS “Princess Royal” class 4-6-2 was sitting, shining under the sun with a nice Burgundy paint scheme and the nameplate reading “Princess Elizabeth”. She had steam up, and a rake of four coaches was marshalled behind her, waiting for them, and a sandbagged flak wagon behind that, with three wizards and a Russian 57mm automatic cannon on it, showing that no chances were being taken. It wouldn’t do any good against a modern jet, but it could still chop up helicopters, and men on the ground.</p><p>Hermione simply pushed ahead to speak with Daphne, which did net her a glare from Ron. “Major, quite a lot of preparation for just a short trip to Hogsmeade, don’t you think?”</p><p>“You’ll make a speed run to London just as soon as the rake is turned at Hogsmeade, I’ve been told, if it works. Or rather, we. I’m in the charge of the security detail, Ma’am,” Daphne answered, her face schooled with aristocratic Slytherin perfection to show nothing of what she thought about interacting with Hermione like that. “The Lady Regent’s orders, personally.”</p><p>Hermione nodded. <em>Of course Narcissa wants to take personal control of the situation as quickly as she can. </em>“Thank you, Major.”</p><p>“Of course, Ma’am.” Daphne waited on the ground until they all climbed onboard, double-checked the readiness of the guard with her Sergeant-Major, and then swung herself up in the vestibule of one of the coaches and leaned out the far side, gripping the grab-iron with a single black gloved hand, and waving to the driver with the other. The driver acknowledged with a long blast of the whistle, and a moment later they were underway.</p><p>The coaching stock was very nicely appointed, and Hermione caught up Andromeda in one of the parlours, swinging her chair around to face her after she sat. “Andromeda, how is Bellatrix?”</p><p>“I am sorry I couldn’t answer before. She’s <em>fine. </em>You were in far more danger, I’m sure. She…” Andromeda shook her head and laughed softly. “They say she’s liberated Valladolid, based on the latest news. She gutted the entire front like a fish—opened it right up, and stormed ahead. So very, very Bella—an impatient, restless genius, who lives life with everything on her sleeve.”</p><p>Hermione felt herself spontaneously crying, and reached up to wipe her eyes. “Of course she’s fine. Of course she is. Delphi?”</p><p>“She stayed with Draco, just like Teddy. Now they’re with Craig’s family and the Tonkses, just to get them some muggle influence: don’t tell Bella.”</p><p>“Good. Gods, good.” Hermione leaned back, closed her eyes, a faint grin appearing and then quickly fading. “Are we really going to do this?”</p><p>“I was warned by Moskva that the mission had succeeded. Well, Cissy was. So I assume the answer is yes, Hermione.” A wry smile was offered, gently, and Andromeda got up and embraced her. “I’m sorry that Bella isn’t here for you, but you know that it would be so difficult when this situation is already difficult. And she’s in her element, doing great things which are making her a legend. In three weeks in command she completely turned the front around in Galicia, and counterattacked splendidly. She <em>needs </em>that.”</p><p>“You just want her away from this,” Hermione whispered. “But I understand.”</p><p>With a rushing of the drivers, they rolled out smoothly across the viaduct on the approach through the Scottish countryside toward Hogwarts. It felt so very very different, as an adult, wearing her uniform.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Perhaps it had been best that she had resolutely refused to think about this. About the arriving at Hogsmeade station on the special train, about the guards who held open the doors, the rifles raised and clapped in salute, striding wizards and witches in robes and uniforms. Goblins on patrol, under arms.</p><p>Hogsmeade, a militarised city. It was so strange, and she hadn’t often been there in summer, either, to see it all in this warmth. The castle seemed healthier for it. The causeway had already been repaired, presumably, here, by magical effort.</p><p>The last time Hermione had been on it, she had nearly died trying and failing to lead the effort to disarm the magical charges; but it had been good enough, she’d been told later, for Luna to bring up a flying tree, and let the Army cross over. Now, she couldn’t even tell where the original arches ended and the new replacements began. The entire event was mercifully hazy—just the infirmary, and waking up to Bellatrix, and the furious evil she had discovered, the mass graves, and…</p><p>
  <em>This. It’s time. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>We’re really doing it.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Harry? </em>
</p><p>A shudder and an unnatural chill took her as they entered the castle. This was true magic, true magic. No Arithmancy could quantify it. No formal ritual could summon it.</p><p>The Water of Death. The Water of Life. They simply <em>were. </em></p><p>The Thing in Itself. The Necessary Existent.</p><p>Professor Flitwick greeted them, carrying a vial that he presented to Andromeda. “Andromeda, it was delivered as promised from the Transcaucasian Front, last night.”</p><p>“Thank you.” Andromeda took it with a polite grace, and turned back. “This is a matter for Professor Flyorov and I. The rest of you should wait.”</p><p>“Harry needs a fam…” Ron started.</p><p>Andy held up her hand, eyes severe. “It’s not worth it, Mister Weasley. We’ll call you in shortly. This is a two-part process, after all.”</p><p>Ron sighed, but turned away. It was only Tamar Dadiani who insisted: “Where my husband goes now, I follow.”</p><p>Andromeda twisted her lips into a patient expression of pain which could only be a thought of her own late husband, and she nodded, and the three went off together.</p><p>Larissa stared after them with an expression so dire that Hermione didn’t know what to say or think or do. Draco drew her into an embrace, publicly and without any cold Pureblood hesitation, and again Hermione was thankful that he had become such a man in his adulthood.</p><p>Hermione felt very isolated, without Bellatrix. She stepped over to Flitwick. “Professor, how long should it be?”</p><p>Flitwick shook his head and muttered something. “Well, you will not find any more powerful magic in existence. I don’t think it will be very long at all, if it’s going to work.” His voice was hoarse, then: “He’s been gone for so long. I can’t imagine what that’s like.”</p><p>Hermione pursed her lips, nodded and tried to be brave about it, the kind of bravery that … No, it was just all nonsense, she just wanted Harry back.</p><p>Five minutes, it was just five minutes, and Andromeda came out, with an expression that was a frozen rictus halfway between shock, wonder and dread. “Come, come now. Hermione, Ron, Ginny, Luna, Dora my dear, you too. It’s fine now. He’s not back yet, but you can be here.”</p><p><em>The Water of Death. </em>Hermione shivered, it could only mean one thing, and dashed on, acutely aware that she had left Larissa behind in Draco’s arms, looking warily after them, on the edge of grief, and Hermione thought she knew why.</p><p>But, Master Flyorov was alive inside. He smiled to them as they arrived, and gestured grandly to the bed which had been so carefully laid out, and then so carefully cleaned by magical means. “Your friend, a good young man,” he offered to them.</p><p>Ron gasped outright. Luna stared in an entranced pride, as if she had always expected, but the Water of Death nonetheless validated everything about how <em>she </em>saw the world. And Hermione, she just stared, unable to find any words, at the completion of the dream, the entire week that seemed like a dream in three parts, the nightmare, the Hut on Chicken Legs, and now – Harry, Harry, his body intact, a young man who had become a man, the hard way, by starting a war too soon, but who was now healed.</p><p>A young man without a scar on his face.</p><p><em>I wonder if Voldemort is screaming somewhere, </em>she thought, with savage fury and happiness.</p><p>“I will leave you with him, my young friends, and wish you all the very best. You will win this war, and I am sure of it. I am going for a picnic with my wife.”</p><p>“Don’t forget to stop and speaking with Larissa,” Hermione managed to say, tearing her eyes from Harry. “She needs it.”</p><p>“...You are the kind of friend she needs, just like Draco is the kind of man she needs. Thank you, I promise you, I will make a little time for her, first. But only if she leaves the castle. It’s a very fine Scottish summer day, and I want to explore, a little.”</p><p>Hermione grinned at that, shaking her head, and thankful that she didn’t need to worry.</p><p>Flyorov looked at her one more time, bemused, and proud of them all, and stepped out with Tamar, to go talk to one of his last students, whose whole adult life had been war, and whose whole future had been recreated by it. One more time.</p><p>And Andromeda, as gently as she could, tipped open Harry’s mouth, looking for all the world like he was just sleeping, and dripped the Water of Life onto his palate, and then sprinkled it across his body, while chanting, low and soft.</p><p>It was summer, and The Boy Who Lived, opened his eyes.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The English reader will be relieved to know that Chocolate Salami is a Soviet-era chocolate sweet made with crushed up biscuits that have gone stale, to fill out the actual chocolate and butter and sugar and so on. </p><p>People who are not from England will probably think I am being a bit too fastidious by insisting on calling a train a "rake", passenger cars "coaching stock", and the engineer as a "driver", and a passing siding a "passing loop", for that matter, but in writing this story, we are all going to be using British English, and there is never an opportunity when I won't try my best to be fussily precise. :-)</p><p>"Adelante España!" means "Forward, Spain!", and unlike most other slogans I could think of in Spain, isn't necessarily associated with a particular kind of politics, which is important for encouraging some national unity.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0091"><h2>91. The World Turned Upside Down</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The World Turned Upside Down. </b>
</p><p> </p><p>The scream was unfathomable. It was the most horrifying, hollow thing that Hermione had heard. She thought it might be magical, it seemed like it reached into her soul and tore at it. Ginny blanched in horror, Andromeda froze in place. Ron grimaced horribly. He drew breath in his lungs, and he screamed, and he screamed. His screams echoed and ripped through the whole of Hogwarts, and left them all thankful that the castle was virtually empty for the summer.</p><p>And Hermione did what was natural in that moment, for her friend. She flung herself down and embraced him as hard as she could. “Harry, Harry, it’s all right, it’s all right. It’s me, it’s Hermione, it’s alright.”</p><p>Ginny was right there with her. They felt a glassy feeling of peace, too, as Andromeda washed a spell over them. His tears stained his cheeks and his breaths came as short, sharp gasps. Hermione had no idea what it was, but, she wondered if that was what the soul felt like, when it left paradise. Harry’s skin was clammy and pulse racing impossibly fast.</p><p>Ginny’s cheeks were just as tear-filled as Harry’s, and Hermione realised the same for her own, without even really thinking about it. “Come on, come on, it’s safe here… It’s so, so safe here, we’re safer here than we’ve been in years Harry.”</p><p>“What… what happened? I just remember the battle beginning, and …”</p><p>“Don’t worry about anything. The battle ended, and we lost, Harry. But we … We fought on, and we’ve recovered Hogwarts from him,” Hermione whispered.</p><p>“My God.” His voice was a breathless whisper. “It felt like agony, what happened?”</p><p>“Your nerves were on fire from coming alive again,” Andromeda murmured. “Rest as much as you need, Harry Potter. You deserve it.”</p><p>“Misses Tonks?”</p><p>“She’s the Headmistress now,” Ginny explained. “God I love you. Please, just rest.”</p><p>Harry had been provided enough information to come to the obvious conclusion. “Misses Tonks is the Headmistress--McGonagall didn’t make it?”</p><p>“I’m sorry, no. It still hurts,” Hermione acknowledged, and the pain blanched across her face like the heat being sucked from her skin. “There’s a lot to explain, but we’re here, Ron is right behind us, and we’ll explain everything, but first, just breathe. And there will be hot tea.”</p><p>“Hey Mate,” Ron offered. “Just hang in there, nice and steady.”</p><p>“Thank you.” A pause. “You sound different. You all do.”</p><p>“There’s a lot to explain, Harry. Just take it easy. Everything is safe here,” Ginny insisted.</p><p>“What about… Have you defeated You Know Who, then?”</p><p>“Riddle is still a threat to the world,” Hermione admitted, not wanting to sugar-coat that one, but still trying to be gentle. “However, he is in Turkey, and we are in control of Britain. People call him by his name now. It’s an act of defiance.”</p><p>“In Turkey? What … Why?”</p><p>“I promise you’ll know by the end of the day, but let’s take things slowly.”</p><p>“Well, I guess I’m supposed to fight him, right?” Harry said in frustration.</p><p>“He’s scared shitless of you,” Ron offered.</p><p>“Ron, I …” Harry could tell that things were not quite right. That Ron was not quite right. He gently pushed Ginny and Hermione away enough to sit up.</p><p>Stared into Ron’s face. His face was overcome with shock. He looked to Hermione—and again, his expression was overcome with shock.</p><p>“What’s happened to the two of you?”</p><p>“This is going to be a very long story, Harry,” Hermione began, then halted. “I mean, we’ll have plenty of time on the train to London.”</p><p>“...Leaving Hogwarts? Is it time for the Express?”</p><p>“No, a special train has been laid on,” Hermione answered automatically.</p><p>“Hermione, you’re… Older. And I never thought you’d cut your hair in your life,” Harry began, with a growing sense of panic in his words. “Ron, you’ve got to tell me…”</p><p>Ron sighed, shook his head, ignored his sister’s glare. “It’s been six years, Harry. More than six, by a bit. It’s the summer of two thousand and four.”</p><p>“What.. I was..” He shook his head. “I was dead. That’s what that was. I was dead!”</p><p>“Have some tea, young man,” Andromeda murmured, pushing herself in and presenting the cup to him. <em>How very British of us. ‘You were dead, but now you’re not, so have some tea’, </em>Hermione mused, choking back the bleak bitter bemused laughter for Harry’s sake.</p><p>Harry took the cup, even with his horrified expression at his friends and his girlfriend. “I was dead, that’s what that was. And you brought me back. How is that possible? Not even the Master of Death can do that.”</p><p>“We had some help from Russia,” Ginny began.</p><p>“...Is that what those uniforms you’re wearing are?”</p><p><em>Well of course they are. </em> But suddenly Hermione realised that Harry had lived such a repressed, abusive life under the Dursleys that he didn’t know what a Russian Army uniform looked like. Hermione at the age of eleven had, from watching BBC alongside her parents as the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed and other events at the time which seemed good but she had in the past five years learned a much more nuanced view toward. She had seeing the grinding poverty and social collapse which had started <em>before </em>the nuclear war.</p><p>Hermione smiled wryly. “Well, yes. I’m a Senior Councillor of Witchcraft in the armed forces of the Russian Ministry of Witchcraft. Since the Ministry doesn’t have a similar formal system of ranks, it’s easiest to introduce me in English, as Colonel Granger.”</p><p>“Colonel? Isn’t that important?”</p><p>“Hermione and Ron both did very well for themselves,” Ginny said. “I’m just a bloody Captain.”</p><p>“The Russians took over fighting Voldemort, then… What, what about the Ministry, about Shacklebolt?”</p><p>“I’m sorry, Harry,” Tonks interchanged then, and she stepped closer, her hair black. “There’s a hell of a lot to cover but that’s mostly it, yes; Shacklebolt’s dead.”</p><p>“...Tonks. Are Remus and Teddy alright?”</p><p>“—Teddy is fine, Harry,” Tonks answered, her expression frozen. It told Harry everything he needed to know.</p><p>“Oh God, I’m sorry.” His hands shook, and the tea dripped on the side of the cup. “Oh God.”</p><p>Andromeda briefly closed her eyes. “It’s best if we head for the train, Harry. We can explain everything aboard. It’s very comfortable and … It gives everyone a moment to think of where to begin.”</p><p>Hermione was suddenly overtaken by an intense and unstoppable nausea. She staggered away from Harry’s bed, and despite all of her effort, collapsed the ground, vomiting.</p><p>“Awh shit. She must have taken some kind of dose at Chernobyl after all,” Tonks exclaimed, moving quickly to Hermione’s side.</p><p>“...<em>Chernobyl!?</em>” Harry wasn’t <em>that </em>dense about the muggle world!</p><p>“All of you,” Andromeda instructed firmly, holding the vial which had held the Water of Life for Harry. “There is no harm; it is already taken from the lake. A drop for each of you.” She insisted, carefully, like any good potioneer, dripping out a single drop of the dregs left in the vial for each of those who had gone into the brutal heart of the Reactor Building. It wasn’t enough to completely heal them, but it brought some immediate relief.</p><p>“What about Master Flyorov and Larissa?” Hermione asked.</p><p>“I have enough left for them,” Andromeda promised.</p><p>And that was Harry’s introduction to how utterly the world had been turned upside down.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Hermione had been evaluated in the infirmary by both healers and Doctors. They quickly concluded that, with the delayed onset and the relative paucity of other symptoms, that she had taken an acute whole-body absorbed dose of about 2 Grays and with magical and technological supporting care—they were very experienced in treating radiation casualties at this point—she would recover from her symptoms in a day or two, particularly after the single drop of the Water of Life, which if insufficient to heal her perfectly, remained the only efficacious known healing magic against radiation.</p><p>‘Don’t worry, it isn’t even enough to make your hair fall out’ wasn’t exactly what one would have gotten as a response before the war began to this kind of acute radiation exposure, but here, this long after the war, it was about what was to be expected. It meant, anyway, that Bella’s magic had worked; the anti-radiation shield had actually protected them. An entire new field of magic had been opened by her lover’s research of those decades before. It was wonderful, and Hermione was proud of her. But she was also terribly ashamed for having interfered in the careful plan to ease Harry into an understanding of this world.</p><p>It was evening when they returned to Hogsmeade. Hermione looked to see Larissa standing there on the platform of the station, smoking. With the doses of radiation Larissa had already taken, Hermione could tell in an instant that her friend was suffering from the same sickness, and yet hadn’t been to the infirmary, or had a drop of the Water of Life, yet.</p><p>Draco was nearby, talking with Major Greengrass. He kept worriedly glancing toward Larissa every so often, and seemed relieved when Hermione arrived, then frowned at her own appearance. “Lara’s not well.”</p><p>“I think we both took a dose, worse than the others did,” Hermione answered. “It’s more than that, though. She looks like death. The good news is that Andromeda should be along soon, to give her one drop left over from Harry’s. It should be enough to help.”</p><p>“It’s more than just being sick—talk to her, Hermione. She wanted to be alone, but—talk to her.”</p><p>“Oh fuck, Draco, I can hear that!” Larissa called, making Draco look sheepish. There was a death’s head grin on her lips as she took a drag from the cigarette.</p><p>Hermione saw it and hastened to her friend’s side. “We’ve both suffered acute radiation syndrome, Lara. You should get that damned thing out of your mouth and find a doctor.”</p><p>Larissa snorted, but behind the gesture of insouciance, Hermione could see tears welling again. “You know, Hermione, you know as a point of objective fact, that for a dose of two Grays or less, ninety-five percent of the time or more you’re fine, and treatment literally does nothing at all. Onset would have been sooner if it was higher than two Grays. I’ll be fine.”</p><p>“Lara…”</p><p>“Shut up and have a cigarette, ‘Mione. It’ll cure the nausea.”</p><p>She was seized with a terrible and certain dread. She took the offered belomor from Larissa, and the light that followed. Larissa was right, of course she was. The horrible acrid intensity nonetheless nicely batted back the nausea. Potions were only palliative against radiation (though she imagined that the entire new field of magic that Bellatrix had established might well fix that soon enough); this was like its own awful kind of magic at how quickly it banished her sickness, even if it was only temporary. <em>Gods, I’m such an addict. </em>She hung there, leaning against the side of one of the passenger coaches, and smoked silently with Larissa.</p><p>Finally, her friend seemed to calm. “What’s wrong?” Hermione at last ventured. “It’s not like you to push Draco away and I can plainly see it’s not something that he did.”</p><p>Larissa took another hard drag before she answered. “It’s Master Flyorov. He will die with the next new moon. Which is in four days. He’s going with Lady Tamar to a cottage in the Highlands, to keep his promise to the Baba Yaga that he’ll be buried here, instead of in Russia. For some reason, that was important, and he said he’d keep it.”</p><p>“Gods, why?” Hermione trembled, thinking of the old man who had been so kindly, so dignified, who had protected Delphi for Bellatrix, who had helped her, who had helped them all.</p><p>Larissa pulled the cigarette from her lips and glared at Hermione for a minute. “Did you think that the Water could bring everyone back to life that it pleased? Oh, it can heal anyone who manages to drink it, the Water of Life can. The Water of Death can kill anyone who drinks it; it can restore any body which it’s sprinkled on. A wonderful open casket funeral I suppose. But, Hermione, it’s hard to cheat death, and the Waters don’t do it exactly; they let you cheat death once. One person at a time.”</p><p>“Gods. He chose to die so we could bring Harry back.”</p><p>“As he put it to me just an hour ago: ‘Dear, rare is the opportunity that an old man has to save a young man’s life in a War.’ And, it’s very peaceful. You just fade away, with the end of the lunar cycle.”</p><p>Hermione’s eyes welled with tears, and she inhaled from the cigarette like a drowning woman. “Gods. Don’t tell Harry, it would destroy him.”</p><p>“It’s already destroyed me, ‘Mione.” Her voice ached with the loss.</p><p>Hermione squeezed her friend hard, and waved to Draco, who came over immediately. He embraced his fiancee without hesitation, even sharing the embrace with her best friend—the woman who was about to become his aunt, in law.</p><p>“I’m not letting you say that, Lara. We’ve both got lives ahead of us.” They hugged and cried, and held each other, and supported Larissa, in mourning one more life lost in this terrible war, one more father and husband and brother.</p><p>Andromeda arrived, as she had promised, looking concerned. “Larissa Sergeivna, I’ve been looking for you. I have something for you,” she coughed. “Put aside the cancer stick, and stick out your tongue, if you would.”</p><p>“The Water of Life,” Hermione supplied.</p><p>“I don’t want to even think about <em>water </em>right now…” Larissa muttered, her look fresh and flush with pain, renewed with what a thought of the Water of Life <em>or </em>Death did for her right now.</p><p>Andromeda to Draco and Hermione.</p><p>“You won’t need to find Master Flyorov after this, I guess that’s who you were looking for,” Hermione supplied. “He’s dying. And the water, nor anything else can save him.”</p><p>“Harry?” Andromeda asked simply.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“I’m sorry.”</p><p>Larissa cried harder into Draco’s shoulder. “He is so proud, that as an old and infirm man, he could do the dying in this war for a young man, why is he so proud…”</p><p>Hermione and Draco tugged her toward Andromeda. “Come on,” Draco whispered to her. “He also wants you to live, and so do we all. Stick out your tongue for Aunt Andromeda.”</p><p>At last, Larissa turned toward her Aunt-to-be, and stuck out her tongue. Seeing her awful state, Andy quietly used both of the last drops in the vial.</p><p>And then, at last, the whistle warned that it was time to board.</p><p>Hermione didn’t even know how it was possible to be alive and feel like this, and yet there she was, breathing. And this terrible night with no respite had just begun. Now they had to tell Harry everything, and somehow negotiate all that came after. She felt utterly bleak—just utterly, utterly bleak.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Still no fucking word from the Pripyet.</p><p>Bellatrix woke up to that frustration, and shrugged, hastily glancing through the dispatches on her nightstand and then boiling water with her wand to quickly create a steaming mug of instant coffee. Coffee in hand, she wandered out onto the portico lined balcony of the classical building that she had quartered her staff in, overlooking the Plaza Mayor. To create an immediate separation and vision of independence for the Junta de la Salvación Nacional, Jorge and his men were quartered separately in the Casa Consistorial.</p><p>She tossed on her duster over her nightclothes, and nursed the cup in her hands. The inland air in the morning was cool, but it would heat up fast. Looking around the room, frozen in time, at last Bellatrix shook her head and descended to the private, secured room that held the Telecaster. She was surprised to see that Jorge was waiting for her.</p><p>“M’lady. No news?”</p><p>“No news. I was going to harass Cissy about it.”</p><p>“Hermione is a brave woman, I…”</p><p>“If bravery was all that mattered, none of us would be here like this,” Bellatrix shrugged. “Though, it does count for something,” she acknowledged with a faint smile, admitting that she was nearly the poster child for reckless bravery. She raised the cup to her lips. “I’ll be returning to Tordesillas to meet the Portuguese in four hours, I believe, for that summit. You have a government now, my friend?”</p><p>“I do. I imagine we will part fairly soon, and I don’t know if we will see each other again, if I am to stay here and lead the liberation of my homeland, and you are to go east to face down that beast once and for all. But, Lady Black, I will just say this – you have been both my Oppressor and my General. Whatever happens, and no matter how long each of us live and no matter what the end of all of this is, and no matter how we are otherwise remembered – I swear with God as my witness that I make my own free choice, right now, to remember you only as my General.” He came to attention, and saluted.</p><p>Bellatrix stared for a moment. She tried to think of all the things that she could say, but they just left her, none of them would come. She raised her cup of coffee to acknowledge the salute. <em>Fifty-three years, and this is where I am. </em> Finally, something came to her. “Jorge, you taught me that a muggle is also a Man. Everything else flowed from that. When I face him, I will reward you for that. He will be greeted with the shout of ¡ <em>Viva el Muerte</em>! – that’s it. Free your land my friend, you deserve to be the one. We’re both flawed people, but we chose to make the right choice at the right time, and that’s in the end, I suppose, all that separates a hero from a villain.”</p><p>They both laughed at the irony of it, and Bellatrix, with a little touch of wandless magic, unlocked the door to the Telecaster room, and stepped inside. She closed it behind her, set her half-full mug down on the table before the Telecaster, and thought back to all the times she’d commanded these Black Guards. They wouldn’t be with her when she went to face Voldemort, but knowing the power he now commanded, she thought that good. She wanted them to see an end to the war.</p><p>She reached for her wand. The gears whirred, the epicycles began to spin and interlock, the bronzen workings turned, the number-wheels rolled. An image began to form, when it was acknowledged by the woman on the other side. Narcissa, already at her desk, perfectly done up in every way, the very image of what everyone wanted the Prime Minister to be right now, composed, regal, professional, dignified, confident. The adjectives oozed from her bearing like she had practised her entire life to project all of them effortlessly, and, in fact, she had.</p><p>“Bella.” The gentle tone in her voice when she greeted her sister, though, was absolutely sincere.</p><p>“Cissy. I’m in Valladolid, you know. Nice city. We took it with just a few desultory small arms engagements and some shelling around the southern outskirts—the old city is perfectly intact and, I understand, the largest not hit by a nuke in Castile proper.”</p><p>Narcissa sniffed lightly. “You will doubtless be pleased to know that the press are comparing you to Montgomery, Wellington and Marlborough.</p><p>“Don’t really think I’m the type, to be honest. Prettier, for one.” Oh yes, she did enjoy tweaking her sister a bit.</p><p>“I’m sure they’d agree,” Narcissa answered, ever-so-mildly. “I won’t delay it any longer, you’ve obviously contacted me about Hermione, and the answer is that she arrived in Britain yesterday. To my knowledge, she’s fine—certainly fine enough to They already travelled to Hogwarts. <em>Lord Potter </em>is alive again.”</p><p>“...You didn’t tell me!?” A flash of anger crossed her face. “I, Cissy, I was worried stiff about her…”</p><p>“You were also liberating Valladolid, and I frankly didn’t need you here, or need the risk of the embarrassment of you decamping from your Army to insert yourself in this. I have carefully arranged everything to manage the situation, and I should like very much to keep it that way.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Harry had stared at her like she had a second head when she fell into one of the chairs in the plush parlour and lit up another cigarette, looking so close to death, between the manifesting symptoms of ‘minor’ radiation poisoning and the emotional exhaustion of realising that Flyorov would be dead within days. Andromeda bit her lip like she wanted to say something, but then thought better of it and settled back.</p><p>“Harry, I’d like you to meet my friend, Lady Larissa Sergeivna Naryshkina.” Larissa managed to look dapper, lithe, beautiful even when she was sick, even when she was emotionally miserable. Her neat black hair braided back, her blue eyes so, so sad, she nonetheless made politely to Harry.</p><p>“As a friend of Hermione’s, just call me Larissa. I’ll be in the next carriage.”</p><p>“A pleasure, I…”</p><p>“She’s a front comrade of mine,” Hermione explained, letting Larissa leave, to be with Draco, to get some sleep in one of the sleeping compartments. Gods knew that she needed it… Gods knew that Hermione did, too. But she couldn’t, she wouldn’t leave this to someone else with Harry.</p><p>Then Ron sat down with them, a five days’ stubble on his face, looking just as exhausted. “‘Mione, if you’ve got a smoke?”</p><p>Their relationship would probably never be so awful that she’d deny Ron a cigarette. He looked at it. “Oh Christ, couldn’t you at least smoke Primas?” This didn’t stop him from lighting it up...</p><p>“You both smoke now?”</p><p>“I managed to quit for about nine months starting last year,” Hermione offered. She supposed that was unhelpful, though. The train was underway, now, heading south.</p><p>Harry reached out and squeezed Andromeda’s hand, hard. On his other side, Ginny sat, and leaned against him, saying nothing—just being there for him. It was just the five of them, then, in the entire coach. And Harry trusted Andromeda, to some extent, Hermione assumed, as Tonks’ mother, as a woman who had given him shelter during his flight, and as one of Dumbledore’s successors—though he knew nothing at the moment of how she got the position.</p><p>Hermione thought of a song by Al Stewart, really appropriate for this trip. It was almost nine minutes long; it was all about trains, and also about the Holocaust, and also about Jean Jaurès getting shot down by a nationalist fanatic days before the First World War broke out. Only Al could make such songs work. She wondered, idly, if he was still alive and if he would want to write any songs about <em>this </em> war. <em>Trains. </em></p><p>“Tell me everything,” Harry said, much more insistently now. He reached up and rubbed where his scar had been. “Start at the beginning, start with the Battle of Hogwarts, and <em>tell me everything. </em>People have hidden so much from me—all my life. You’re my friends, tell me.”</p><p>So they told him. They told him, until he cried for everyone who had died at the Battle of Hogwarts. They told him, through the blank horror of how Voldemort had seized power in Britain. They told him, his eyes fixed on them, of Andromeda’s organising the escape—of the Malfoy defection from Voldemort’s cause. They told him, all about reaching Europe.</p><p>They told him about the nuclear war. They told him about the dead, they told him about Voldemort’s chilling slogan, of ‘culling the muggle herd’. The night the bombs fell, where Hermione spent some time elaborating on Ron’s desperate attempt to save lives in the ruined city of Metz, which at length proved he did still have some of a sense of embarrassment left, at least when being complimented in a way he didn’t feel was deserved.</p><p>They told, then, of Narcissa organising the flight across Germany in goods vans on the railways, lurching over damaged track, avoiding cities clouded with plumes of radioactive dust. They told him about the Russian troops, arriving in western Poland at the invitation of the government; of their interrogations, and their being granted permission to go on into Russia, while the Russian Army fought to slow Voldemort’s forces down along the Oder-Neisse Line.</p><p>About the defeat of those Armies, and the inexorable advance of the Morsmordre as the entire world rushed to bow and scrape and kiss the ring, and only China and India fought at the side of the CIS, save for the dwindling power of the ANZAC federation fighting for its life in the South Sea.</p><p>And Ron told about his completion of infiltration training, and how he had been sent into the cities of Central Europe, to rally muggle resistance, and organise bombings and assassinations and sabotage. About how he had first volunteered for this because he wanted to die.</p><p>Because he had failed.</p><p>Harry broke down at that point, sobbing against Ginny, and insisting again and again, that he didn’t dare believe it, that he couldn’t believe it. But, they were in Edinburgh, and he could see, in the lights of the train shed at the station, the masses of soldiers reporting to troop trains, the goods rakes that slowly rolled through on the main line, carrying tanks and armoured cars. He could see the propaganda posters. The security guards, with automatic weapons.</p><p>The young witch in uniform, who entertained a group of muggle children quite openly, with a few simple and silly spells of the type they had learned in their first year at Hogwarts.</p><p>So, east of Edinburgh, they briefly halted on the main line, and showed him the vicinity of Joppa, where the fused glass on the ground and the sharply clicking radiation dosimeters marked the point that a GRU backpack nuke had gone off in a futile attempt to kill Voldemort. The Main Line had been rerouted around the spot, but ruined, abandoned, burned and slagged houses remained, and with the casual abandon of a world where radiation was now normal, the trains merely passed with their windows sealed for safety.</p><p>He stopped crying, and got very quiet after that.</p><p>Ginny and Hermione told him about joining the MinKol Army Support Troops. Of their first meeting with the redoubtable Alexandra Lukachenko, who Hermione prayed was still alive. Of finally being in a unit together with Larissa. And of the ill-fated Southern Bug Strategic Offensive Operation, the first attempt of the CIS to organise a major front-level counteroffensive against the Morsmordre. Of the initial grand successes which liberated the southwest Ukraine, and carried across the River Dnestr. With a wave of her wand, Andromeda stuck one of Hermione’s dog-eared pocket maps up on the wall, and oriented Harry with it.</p><p>Now Ron was just as silent as Harry was. He occasionally shot a glare at Hermione. She could feel him trying to project a warning about the Prisoner’s Dilemma at her! <em>You bring up Chisinau, I’ll bring up Bellatrix, </em>she could hear it, see it written across his face.</p><p>Even Harry commented on it. “You two… You’re not together anymore, are you?”</p><p>“Broke up years ago,” Ron sighed, and promptly went for another cigarette.</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p><em>Still no screaming row. </em>It was a relief, if the smallest of one. So Hermione just told about how she had met up with Ron, who had been operating behind the enemy lines in Moldova, only for them to be forced to retreat again when a massive counterattack with a huge reinforcement by crack Death Eaters and Morsmordre fighting wizards had overcome the local advantage in tanks and artillery of the Russian Army and its allies, leaving two million men and thousands of armoured vehicles destroyed on the field and opening the way for a renewed Morsmordre offensive deep into the very heart of Russia and the Confederation.</p><p>“And then… We had a ray of hope,” Hermione whispered, exhausted, sick, tired, and she didn’t fucking care if Ron was upset at the way she put it.</p><p>Harry looked too tired to sleep. He blinked between the two.</p><p>Ron sank back in his chair, let his head fall back, staring up to the roof of the compartment, smoke drifting off the end of his cigarette. “Bellatrix Lestrange switched sides, and carried away two entire Fronts of Voldemort’s troops. She turned her cloak. Kicked the Morsmordre right out of the eastern Ukraine and all Russia.”</p><p>“Bellatrix… Defected? <em>She </em>turned on the Dark Lord?”</p><p>“She was afraid for her daughter, and Andromeda and Narcissa were already on our side,” Hermione said, barely above a whisper, her voice subdued. She was as sick as hell, and living on cigarettes and willpower at the moment. In fairness to him, Ron wasn’t much better off. “And disillusioned with the nuclear war. With the breaking of all of his promises. So, yeah, she came to us, in Ossetia, and offered to switch sides.”</p><p>“My God…” Harry cracked a grin, though. “That must have hurt Voldemort sore, though. And that’s when the tide turned?”</p><p>“Yes, we dealt several other defeats to the Morsmordre, and then we liberated Scandinavia.” Hermione felt relief at moving faster with the explanation, then, and took a brief time explaining the liberation of Scandinavia, and then Britain, and the powerful forces which were unleashed by the nuclear attack on Azkaban. They hadn’t covered Ararat yet, though.</p><p>“So what happened to Bellatrix?” Harry asked at last. It was unavoidable, then.</p><p>“Well, in recognition of her service,” Andromeda interjected, perhaps trying to avoid either Ron or Hermione explaining it, “my sister requested and received from His Majesty the King, a pardon, on Bellatrix’s behalf.”</p><p>“Your sister, you mean, Narcissa…” Harry’s face was frozen in a rictus of horrified emotions.</p><p>“Harry, I’ll just get this one out,” Ron sighed, and brought the cigarette back to his lips. “Narcissa Malfoy is the Prime Minister of Britain.”</p><p>“And Bellatrix?”</p><p>“Field Marshal Lady Black. She’s commanding a fucking Army in Spain, mate. On <em>our</em> bloody side.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>"The World Turned Upside Down" is the tune supposedly played by the British on the surrender at Yorktown in the American Revolutionary War--the absolute upset of the entire old order and old way of life.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0092"><h2>92. The Pensieve</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Pensieve.</b>
</p><p> </p><p>It was not like Bellatrix’s presence in the high command of the British Army could have been hidden from Harry, when they arrived in London late the next morning. The special train was spotted at the usual 9 and 3/4ths Platform at Kings Cross for Hogsmeade arriving trains, but there was no attempt at secrecy now, not in the sense of keeping the magical world hidden from muggles. There were men under arms, standing guard. In the end, an exhausted Hermione had managed to sleep, and had to be half dragged out of her compartment, to turn out for their departure at London.</p><p>He had not taken it well. In the end, Andromeda had given him some potions to help him sleep. Hermione knew that he was almost profoundly disassociated from the reality he was in, while dealing with the fact there was no going back to the reality he had come from. Time was the cruelest of all mistresses.</p><p>The very City of London itself had changed radically in ways one could not imagine from having seen it in media of the 1980s. Because London entailed meetings of importance and protocol, there were many officers bearing ceremonial swords who were coming and going from the trains amidst the crowd, in their dress uniforms. But their party attended a certain other kind of respect, because having come straight from Russia, and looking so rough, they had the air of experienced front veterans, who had not had any time to freshen up. There were knowing looks from those who had experienced the same, even if they had some gloss on at the moment. In the middle of that, as a civilian and a young man who was not in uniform, Harry was out of place, and he knew it. And worse, the world itself was taking a step back in time in its culture, under the pressure of the hardship of the war.</p><p>But looming above it all was a simple encounter with a newspaper stand. With rationing of electricity in effect in many areas due to the damaged power grid and the need to devote all possible electrical power to the needs of wartime industry above everything else, the only absolutely guaranteed way to get the news was a paper. And, The Times was reporting on the fall of Valladolid. Splashed across the front page in a massive full-body shot, riding propped up on the top of a command track, wand stuffed in her tousled hair and her uniform British but never regulation, the glint of metal from her exposed left wrist, there was Bellatrix.</p><p>Harry just stared. Took a breath, and another. He very slowly turned to Hermione. “How can you stand it, ‘Mione? She tortured you. And the <em>Prime Minister’s </em>house was where it happened, too. And they’re just...” He shrugged and gestured around them.</p><p>Daphne had buckled her sword, since she was in London, and escorting an important visitor to the Prime Minister. She turned around, then—and rested her hand on the hilt. “Lord Potter, you can ask the Duchess of Lancaster yourself if you like, as to what she pleases to do with her family; that’s where we’re headed, now. The motorcade is waiting outside.”</p><p>“Hermione … What did she just call me?”</p><p>“Dumbledore never explained to you a lot of things about your father,” Hermione admitted.</p><p>And then Larissa arrived, her arm on Draco’s, with the both of them in uniform. When Harry spied them, his face was shocked for a moment, as he clearly recognised the woman introduced as Hermione’s friend in that terrible strange night before. And, of course, he recognised Draco, too.</p><p>“<em>You!</em>”</p><p>Draco and Larissa turned to face him. In his dress uniform, Draco had his medals on his chest. Twice Hero.</p><p>There were many men who saluted him for that, whether or not military protocol strictly called for a salute.</p><p>“Lord Potter, I do owe you an apology, but nor have I any right to detain you when you’re due for a meeting with the Duchess of Lancaster. And, my fiancee is ill, and I’m taking her somewhere to rest.” This was not the Draco of six years before. He had gained a confidence and a graciousness which he had never had at Hogwarts, and gained it by facing his fears in war.</p><p>“But, you <em>served </em>Him…”</p><p>For a pregnant moment, there was silence, before Larissa, in frustration, pointed to Draco’s chest. “A man with these doesn’t need to explain anything,” she said, and tugged him away.</p><p>Poor Harry. He didn’t understand the context. He was still trying to frantically understand what was going on around him. And Hermione was genuinely a bit upset, because she thought the entire encounter was staged by Daphne and Draco, and Larissa had gone right along with it! But a moment later, she had to admit it was clever. Harry needed to have his viewpoints, the viewpoints of the world of six years ago, challenged before they led him into making decisions in the world of 2004. And that had to happen quickly.</p><p>So Hermione stepped up to cover for him. “Harry,” she began, and waved at Daphne, trying to get her to resume walking. “Draco was decorated twice, for extreme bravery in the face of the enemy—in the face of the Morsmordre. And, if he was ever captured, he would face a fate worse than death, but he has nonetheless been on the front this entire time.”</p><p>“Eh.” Ron interjected. “I’ve got them too, but I don’t wear them. Come on, Hermione. Harry ...”</p><p>Andromeda gently cleared her throat. “We really do need to go.”</p><p>Daphne escorted them out with a troop of guards to the street. There, a line of limousines and armoured cars was waiting, with little Union Jacks fixed to flutter on each side of the bonnet on the former.</p><p>After an exchange of salutes, Hermione sank down into one of the limos with Harry and Ron. She leaned in close. “Harry, I have to ask—do you know how to address a Duchess?”</p><p>“Uhh… No?” His wide eyes looked like he was just dealing with one more shocking thing.</p><p>“His Majesty made Narcissa <em>Duchess </em>Narcissa, the Duchess of Lancaster,” Hermione explained. “She should be addressed as ‘Your Grace’.”</p><p>Ron grimaced. “She’s not wrong.”</p><p>“So she’s really in charge?” Harry looked thoughtful. “You said she betrayed Voldemort, the Malfoys did, to save Draco?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Hermione felt like a stranger in a strange land. For six years her best friend had been dead. Then he was alive—he was speaking like he was still in 1998, like the past six years had not happened. But those six years had changed Hermione irrevocably. They had reordered all that she was. Ron might not like it, but he had internalised the idea that Narcissa Malfoy was leading the British resistance to Voldemort.</p><p>Harry could see the damage in the city. He changed the subject. “What happened? Was it like the Blitz?”</p><p>“Voldemort raised a horde of Inferi to punish the people of London for betraying him, among other things,” Ron explained. Hermione felt too exhausted by the memories of that terrible day to actually speak about them.</p><p>“..In the city.” Harry’s jaw clenched, and his eyes wet with tears.</p><p>Hermione reached out and squeezed his shoulder hard. “We’ll stop him. That’s all that matters now. Don’t fucking blame yourself for this. Tom Riddle chose to do this decades ago, it all flows from that, there’s nobody else at fault.”</p><p>Harry, grew silent and calmed again, looking at the ongoing repairs, surprised at the Goblins who were using magic to rebuild several bridges, and the profusion of patriotic banners which covered the city.</p><p>At last, they began to proceed through the security cordons. Hermione could still read Harry’s face pretty well; when they arrived at No.10 Downing Street, it certainly looked like he still felt like he was about to face a <em>Malfoy, </em>a haughty pureblood.</p><p>And from one point of view, he was not wrong. Hermione knew what she was marrying into. They were screened through security, and the rest of the party was taken aside. Ron looked like he wanted to speak up, then and there, but there were two Aurors, now openly dressed in uniforms based on the Metropolitan Police, who refused. Harry was brought in to meet the Prime Minister, alone.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p><em>The Boy Who Lived. </em>Narcissa had come to the conclusion that being the subject of a prophecy such as that was one of the most luckless fates imaginable. She still did not understand the precise working of the prophecy—it was brutally contradictory, as most prophecies were—but from her own point of view, had to assume that there was an element of predestination in it.</p><p>It was dangerous to fight the power of the Gods, and it usually brought you to where they wanted you to go, in the end. All of Voldemort’s efforts had just brought him to this point.</p><p>“Your Grace,” he offered with a slight bow.</p><p>“Please, sit,” Narcissa addressed Harry in response to his presentation, from her place at the Cabinet room table, looking up from her papers of state. “Tea?”</p><p>“Uh, please.” Harry took one more look and shuffled to the seat which a tap of Narcissa’s wand had sent scooting back for him. Another wave of her wand in the air, and the teapot floated over and filled a cup for him.</p><p>“Lord Potter…”</p><p>There was a flash from his eyes. “Why do people keep <em>calling me that</em> ? Daphne Greengrass, <em>Draco, </em> and now <em>You. </em>Misses—Your Grace,” he hastily corrected. “Did someone go and make me a Lord while I was… Dead?”</p><p>“No, you’ve been a Lord since the day your father died,” Narcissa answered plainly, knowing very well that either she would manage this to create some measure of loyalty in Harry, or else the entire situation would become hopelessly problematic. “He was a Lord Magical, of the Wizengamot. Not all Pureblood families are, but the Potters were perfectly prestigious. Such seats are inherited whether or not you are Pureblood. His decision to take Lily Evans as his wife was exceptional, but it did not disinherit his children from the Wizengamot. You are, in fact, a Lord.”</p><p>Harry rocked back and stared at her. He seemed very disquieted, disoriented, but he had been alive again for only a day now, and that was, Narcissa supposed, to be expected. She picked up her own cup of tea. “Lord Potter, it’s my intent to make you a deal, to offer you something in exchange for your support. My intention is to help you to understand that this is in your best interest, by providing you with information. First, Dumbledore did not explain to you that you would have a right to take up a seat in the Wizengamot when you came of voting majority—which is not the same as legal adulthood in the Wizarding World, but twenty-five, as it was in Roman times for the Senate. He did not because, I believe, he disagreed with many of the ethics of our society.”</p><p>“And he was right about that,” Harry interjected. He was not unthoughtful, and not too shocked to answer her.</p><p>“Perhaps he was, but he participated in those organisations himself.” In fact, Narcissa believed Dumbledore’s intent was more malicious than that. But pushing hard against Harry’s memory of Dumbledore was unlikely to be productive. “I would ask you to do the same, so that you can speak to your interests in our society. I value a multiplicity of voices, I…”</p><p>“Have you made yourself a dictator?” He asked, bluntly. It was clear he was looking for something to focus on, something to believe about the situation. It would be Narcissa’s chance to reach him, and she wouldn’t have another.</p><p>“Certainly not. I command a majority in Parliament. I will be the Prime Minister until the day I no longer do so. Not a day longer.” There was certainly no need for Potter to understand the full details of the plan. Narcissa wasn’t lying to him, oh no, but she was omitting the fact that she planned to engineer Britain’s equivalent to the Liberal Democratic Party in post-war Japan. “I have no interest in upsetting the fundamental constitutional order of the Realm, and my government is extremely popular, which I do advise you to take some time to think about. However, I have committed to making a government which works for all Britons, and that includes yourself.”</p><p>“What’s government without justice?” Harry’s eyes blazed. “You say you uphold the customs of Parliament and the laws of the Realm, but I understand you pardoned Bellatrix Lestrange. What kind of leader puts her sister before the law? Certainly not Dumbledore, certainly not one I’d follow.”</p><p>Narcissa stared at him for a moment, and smiled very faintly. “I’d counter that, Lord Potter, and ask who can trust a leader who does first look after her family? What Briton, liberated from Voldemort’s rule and wondering if the future will be worse than the future their grandparents enjoyed, would trust me to look after their families if I do not look after my own? Bellatrix, it is true, committed crimes—and she acknowledged that by accepting the Royal Pardon. She has not once protested her innocence. My sister takes full responsibility for what she did, and her pardon is justified by the acts of great personal danger that she willingly undertook to turn the tide of the war against Voldemort, upon her defection. Even now she every day exposes herself to fire, and leads from the front in the Spanish campaign. The entire concept of a pardon is part of the heritage of our laws precisely for someone whose conduct is like her’s.”</p><p>“And nobody will ever be held accountable for Sirius’ death!” He looked so flustered. “He’s your cousin. Doesn’t that matter for anything?”</p><p>“Nobody will ever be held account, Lord Potter, for the fourteen years in which my sister was tortured into madness and right up to the edge of death,” Narcissa let her own voice rise, but then set her tea down, pushed her chair back, and rose before the fireplace. “She was a lunatic when she killed Sirius. The Dementors had consumed everything good and healthy in her mind. Of course it took years for her to be able to approach sanity again. And Sirius hated her, bitterly; it was not an unexpected outcome. Two people of diminished capacity, carrying on a petty grudge against each other to savage ends. Come. Let’s try to understand each other. I have something to share with you, and it’s not something I’d just share with anyone. And, in return, I will let you show something to me.”</p><p>“I don’t understand…”</p><p>Narcissa took three steps, and tossed a cover off what had looked like a giant globe, but was revealed to be a Pensieve. “Harry, if I may, it’s a simple proposition. You can show me what you saw and felt when my cousin died. And I can show you what I saw, and felt, on the night that my sister returned to me after her escape from Azkaban. No claims, no assertions. The real memories, themselves.”</p><p>She stepped forward to the Pensieve, and raised her wand. Swirled out the silver strands of memory into the waiting pool, her eyes gleaming with dark, intense emotion. She had made a calculated decision, to win Potter over with truth. But it would hurt, and only her iron discipline held that in. It hurt, to remember that wonderful and horrible night.</p><p>And Harry stepped forward, and <em>Saw. </em></p><p>He saw the tiny, waif-like figure, frozen, her muscles in a rictus, huddled like a child against Voldemort, with the masses of her tangled and ratted black hair cascading down, with streaks of white from the brutal stress of the years, long before her time as a witch. He could feel the confidence in Narcissa’s memory, that she had everything ready in the Manor to receive and heal the guests, the escapees from Azkaban, turning into horror as she stared at her sister’s condition, at a woman whose bones seemed to be coming out of her pallid, sallow skin.</p><p>“Bella,” Narcissa whispered in that memory, her heart aching in horror. The Dark Lord was giving orders, commanding that she be given food and medicine and rest, and announcing that he was going for the others. She had done so much to prepare herself for this, to prepare herself for ‘bad’, but she had no idea of what this horror would be. Her sister, familiar, and yet forever different.</p><p>Taking her from the Dark Lord’s arms, she was as cold as ice to the touch. Only the evil magic of the Dementors and of Azkaban, feeding on her for so long, had kept her life. The smell upon her was unimaginable. Her eyes bulged from her skull, like she were some monstrous raised corpse rather than her living sister.</p><p>Narcissa’s eyes were filled with tears as she smoothed down Bella’s hair in a fitful and futile effort, embracing her tightly, against a limp Bella who did nothing. “Prepare the bath, mildly hot only,” she instructed to the house elves, who bustled around in horror and tried to prepare things for Mistress Bella as best as they could. She had to assume that Bellatrix had not experienced heat in fourteen years, and that anything other than the mildest touch of hot water would be excruciating to her.</p><p>Taking her to the bath, Narcissa vanished her prison garb, wishing nothing more than its utter destruction; and washed her sister, herself, with tears continuously falling from her eyes. The scourgifying and the untangling spells for the hair combined with the bath, the oil, the soap, the water. Again and again. Narcissa soiled her own clothes, but spared nothing, she cleaned Bellatrix everywhere, she made sure of everything, shifting her with the utmost delicacy. Healing potions were dropped in the water, and finally it brought Bella forth from the emotions that she had been feeling, the way she had been frozen in place.</p><p>“Cissy…” It was a hoarse whisper so awful it scarcely seemed like it could belong to the proud, brilliant, brave, impetuous eldest sister of the House of Black.</p><p>“You’re in the Malfoy Manor now, Bella. Tonight is your night, I will be strong for you,” Narcissa instructed firmly, and meant it with every fibre of her being. She was aghast and horrified at what she was seeing. She could not fathom the civilisation that she lived in, which had put her sister through this. It was the first moment where she regretted the course that her husband had launched her son down, and she would never stop regretting it subsequently. Narcissa answered her sister’s questions, finished bathing her, then drained the tub, filled it again, and this time with soothing oils and calming potions. A very small cup of tea was brought for Bellatrix, and she helped her sister to sip it in the tub. Bellatrix expressed no happiness and no pleasure at it. Only thoughts of revenge brought forth a mad cackle. She expressed no happiness or pleasure. Those emotions had been stripped from her by the Dementors.</p><p>Warm and simple food would follow, and with it, potion after potion, spell after spell. Restoring Bellatrix to a desperate simulcra of her previous life, with horror and fear and love for her sister, the ghost-like figure who had lurched from Azkaban, with a blank madness in her soul.</p><p>She did everything she could, but was everything she could good enough? She saw the hollow, blank way that her sister spoke. Her mind flashed through memories of happy scenes of three girls playing in the old woods before Ancient House. Went back to staring at this rag-and-bones woman before her, who only partially healed no matter how much magic was applied. Who could not seem to muster happiness in response to anything.</p><p>Fourteen years, with every positive emotion destroyed by the Dementors, slowly starving and dying by inches, but never quite being allowed to go, between the magic and the indifferent slop shoved into the bars, never enough to sate, just enough to keep you alive, when the Dementors left you too listless and depressed to even kill yourself…</p><p>Who could call that justice?</p><p>As the memory faded away, Harry stared at her, with his own look one of blank horror. The very emotions of the moment had been brought into the Pensieve, and they had both felt them again. He swallowed. “How can you stay calm?”</p><p>“Because I have saved her from ever facing that again. I’ve saved my son. I’ve restored my family. Even if they die, they won’t die alone, and forgotten, in the hands of Dementors. We destroyed Azkaban, with enchanted nuclear weapons. I have no regrets about that, and I never will.”</p><p>“I haven’t a wand for sharing my own memories,” Harry at last observed, pointedly. “And Voldemort, I assume, has the Elder Wand.” He moved to sit back down, silent, introspective, one could tell from his skin he was in a kind of shock. “I can’t imagine how Hermione has dealt with her, after her torture. You witnessed that, and you did nothing.”</p><p>“One can’t stop my sister when she’s like that,” Narcissa answered. “But it was a failure, and I wouldn’t blame Hermione if she hated me for it, but she doesn’t.”</p><p>“Then what will stop her from doing it again? Did Hermione tell you that she doesn’t hate you? She’s often too decent to admit such things. She tries to see the best in the world, and fight to make it better.”</p><p>“Hermione will stop her, mostly,” Narcissa said calmly. “In fact, Hermione has been Bella’s Chief of Staff for nearly the past two years—her right hand woman, if you will.”</p><p>Harry froze. “I don’t believe you. Bring her in, I want to hear it from her herself, if it’s true.”</p><p>“Of course, Lord Potter.” The room was sealed, so Narcissa went to get Hermione herself.</p><p>Hermione, with her skin a sharp and dark summer brown, darker freckles across a face made long and thin by the hardships of the years, eyes sallow and ringed brown, her hair a curled, frizzy mess that defiantly resisted every attempt at a bun. Sitting there looking awful, and like she might just curl up into a ball and sleep anyway.</p><p>“If you would come with me, Hermione?”</p><p>“And what about me?” Ron interjected, as Hermione blearily rose without even answering.</p><p>“One thing at a time, Colonel Weasley,” Narcissa answered, keeping her voice level and calm, and ushered her someday-to-be (Gods blessing them) sister in law back into the Cabinet Room. Pulled out a chair for her, and insisted on putting tea in front of her. Narcissa herself felt fragile at the moment, living through the memories of that night again. Like she wanted to care for her relatives all the more.</p><p>Bellatrix had already keyed Hermione into the wards at Ancient House, so that meant Hermione.</p><p>“Hi, Harry. How … Uhm, what have you talked about?”</p><p>“Narcissa showed me the, uhm, night that Bellatrix came back from Azkaban. She said… She claimed that you worked with Bellatrix, as her Chief of Staff. Is it true? I could scarcely believe it.”</p><p>Narcissa watched as Hermione closed her eyes, took a breath, and breathed in over the tea, probably trying to desperately steady her mind.</p><p>“Harry,” Hermione began. “Bellatrix defected almost two years ago. At the time I was reading a book—Machiavelli’s <em>Art of War.” </em>She got a crack of a knowing grin out of Harry, making him remember his friend as the Essential Bookworm that she was. “Anyway, it contained advice that… Basically say that even though they will always be hated by both their former allies and by your own side, that it was still best practice to always encourage defections from the enemy, because defections strengthened your side at the same time it weakened their’s, whereas just inflicting defeats on the enemy only weakened them. And we were <em>very </em>weak. The Morsmordre was close to overrunning all of European Russia, and in most sectors of the front had penetrated further than Hitler did. So I followed the advice. There was historical precedent for it, too. I argued, very hard, that we needed to pardon Bellatrix and wholeheartedly permit her to retain command of her forces to counterattack the Morsmordre. We arranged a safe place for her daughter. And… I participated in the infiltration operation where she engineered the Army in the Crimea also defecting. I’ve fought at her side ever since, in two dozen battles, across thousands of kilometres. And I love her, and she loves me.” Hermione hastily held up her hand. “Please, please, don’t fight with me on this. I’m a lesbian, I left Ron for that reason, you could probably tell how far apart we’ve grown. Bellatrix – I can’t explain it, Harry. But I’ve forgiven her. I’ve fallen for her. I’ve made a mess of any kind of respect you could have for me, I guess,” she wiped at her eyes. “But please understand—she doesn’t hurt me. She has healed so much from what she experienced in Azkaban, from what she experienced when Voldemort controlled and used her. And she makes no excuses and attempts nothing to mitigate how people think of her, except for real deeds, on the front, liberating people, fighting to defeat the forces of the Morsmordre. Hate her, fuck, hate me, but <em>work with her. </em>We can do so much this way. Narcissa and Bellatrix and Andromeda, they liberated Britain, they’ve freed tens of millions of people from slavery under the Morsmordre now.”</p><p>Harry groaned softly, and sank down in his chair. “I… What is this world?”</p><p>“The one we’re in, Lord Potter,” Narcissa offered, rising, and stepping to his side, feeling real sympathy for him, like she might have for Draco in the same place. “And sometimes, and I think this is Hermione’s real lesson and she’s very wise for it, you cannot make sense of it, and you cannot understand what has happened. You have just got to pick yourself up, say: ‘I am here, let’s make the best of it,’ and then carry on. And Bellatrix has done that, and Hermione has done that, and I have done that. And it’s what open to you. I expect nothing of you. You live in a country where the government will speak of this war as a collective national accomplishment. It will not be laid on you, to live with the burden of solitary heroism for the rest of your life. You have the opportunity, now and forever, to simply <em>live </em>and make your own life. But we still need to defeat Voldemort.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “Can you hold yourself together for me?”</p><p>There was a knocking on the door. Narcissa stiffened. She had instructed that she was not to be disturbed under any circumstance whatsoever. That meant it was very serious indeed.</p><p>Hermione nodded to her, wordlessly, and got up on her own, forcing herself up to the door, and exchanging a salute with whomever was on the other side, then turning back, she held a piece of paper, a dispatch. Her expression was as cold as hell. “Narcissa, we’ve run out of time. Voldemort has launched his attack on Lake Van, and he’s augmenting the front-line troops with a horde of Inferi.” Then she looked to Harry. “Harry, we've run out of time. We need to finish explaining what needs to happen, and we need to get ready to fight. Please stand with me, despite everything, despite how much like a fever dream this may seem. You can do whatever you want when it's done. But now--now, we've got to finally stop Voldemort.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>They had been under heavy attack for two hours now. The massed enemy artillery was cascading down along the front positions, which they had pulled back all except light pickets around machine-gun nests from, to avoid having their troops decimated in the barrage. Confusing messages travelled from unit to unit down the front, reporting horrifying and new developments presaged by those in London, of masses of Inferi advancing in front of the Morsmordre troops. A horrifying tidal-wave of the dead had flung themselves forward, pinning the defenders until picked teams of Morsmordre troops had stormed their positions. Massed artillery had inflicted shock damage on units at the front, and then the dead had swarmed over them before they could reestablish their forward positions. It was like they were fighting a surging horde of Hell.</p><p>And it was in this atmosphere of confusion, of uncertainty, and of outright fear that was spreading all along the front, that Alexandra Lukachenko reported to General Pronichev’s headquarters, exactly as ordered. The artillery was hammering close to them, and she ducked down, threw herself into the dirt, while the wizard escorting her snapped a quick <em>Protego </em>to help cover the post, as a salvo of heavy rounds from one enemy battery fell amidst the dirt and rock of the slopes nearby, the concussions, the shockwaves in the air, hammering her into the dirt despite her shield. The mountain and the lake on their left flank, and hell on their right. Supporting units directly on the lake to the left, and higher up in the mountains to the right, both collapsing…</p><p>She pushed herself to her feet, already dusty and dirty, and dashed forward the last distance down into the partial dugout, covered with camouflage netting. A line of aeroplanes screamed over ahead at low altitude. Worried and urgent voices shouted:</p><p>“Are they our’s!?”</p><p>“Are they our’s!?”</p><p>“They’re our’s!”</p><p>She left the ragged cheer behind and descended to Pronichev’s headquarters, saluting as she arrived. “Sir.”</p><p>“Alexandra Rostislavna,” he answered, gesturing to a place by the map. General Osminin was leaning over it already, smoke curling from a cigarette clenched between two of his fingers, his face in a sharp mask of concentrating as he measured some distance on the map.</p><p>“Sir,” she acknowledged, and stepped over.</p><p>“We are going to need your wizards ready for the counterattack, and soon. The front is collapsing. The enemy has raised half the dead in Anatolia against us, it’s,” Pronichev trailed off and shook his head. “It’s the fucking apocalypse,” he finished at last, and shook his head once.</p><p>She stared. “..And, we’re attacking?”</p><p>“Yes.” Osminin looked up, shaking his head. “We’ve still got the nukes at the ready. And we’ve got a large stockpile of gas, also.”</p><p>“The front is broken on both flanks, but we have a plan. Our only objective is to defend Ararat, and the lake is close by to the east. If we can front the ridge at Gültepe east of the D959 highway, we can cut the enemy off at Altinova, and then fall back on the lake. The 16<sup>th</sup> Mongolian Division is holding Tatvan, and they won’t try to retreat, if we counterattack. As long as they hold the port, and we link up to them with this attack, then, we can be resupplied, and we will keep the enemy off the coast of the lake around Ararat. Apparation, Floo network, aerial resupply, naval resupply over the lake—we’ll have it all. We can hold on long enough for a major counter-offensive. And if we don’t, well, my instructions are clear, we must die if it’s to keep Voldemort away from Ararat. So, I’m going to need you to execute a breakthrough assault with wizards leading special assault platoons across the entire front, in a chemical and radiological environment, is this understood, Colonel? We will be pushing forward on a broad front to take Altinova, and establish our western defensive positions in the volcanic domes southeast of Budakli.”</p><p>She saluted, informally, looking up from the map after tracing the towns he had indicated, seeing the sense of the attack across the topography, and offered him a wry smile. They were both students of history, and she knew he would appreciate the reference. “<em>Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j'attaque.</em>”</p><p>Pronichev laughed, and grinned broadly. “That’s just it. You have thirty minutes, Colonel. Then we’ll launch the nukes, and begin the counterattack. You can be have your wizards in position for that by then, can’t you?”</p><p>“Of course, Sir. By your leave?”</p><p>“Granted.” A pause. “Colonel. There has been a defining moment in each of the Great Wars that we have fought for our Motherland. Tell your soldiers, Borodino, Kursk--Van. They should fight accordingly.”</p><p><em>So, if any one of us is alive in twenty-four hours, it will be God’s own miracle. </em> Alexandra didn’t need any more information to know that the attack had a high chance of failure and was essentially a suicide mission for an entire corps. But that was what the situation called for, and so they were going to do it, God help them all. <em>Last time, it was like a mock execution. Now it’s the real thing. </em>She saluted. There was nothing left to say. They were all veterans, and she knew her troops—the same. They would understand the stakes.</p><p>
  <em>We attack.</em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The quote:</p><p>Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j'attaque.</p><p>Russian:</p><p>Мой центр сгибается под напором противника, мой правый фланг отступает, ситуация блестящая. Я атакую. </p><p>English:</p><p>My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, excellent situation, I am attacking.</p><p>A dispatch from Foch to Joffre, at the First Marne.</p><p>Other comments:</p><p>So, I was trying to finish this story in a prologue, 100 chapters, an intermission, and an epilogue. For a brief while I thought it would be only 95 chapters. But then I realised it would have to be the original 100 chapters. Now, getting this far in, I have to realise that it would actually be a prologue, 101 chapters, an intermission, and an epilogue. But, either way, we now have only 9 chapters and an epilogue left to go.</p><p>Acknowledgements:</p><p>I want to thank sstasia for writing "I follow the pieces", which inspired me to write a scene recounting Narcissa's healing of Bellatrix. It was a truly grand little short story and absolutely beautiful writing.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0093"><h2>93. The Prince and the Blacksmith</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>The Prince and the Blacksmith</b>
</p><p> </p><p>Inside the storage room of the old grist mill, the general assembly of the Portuguese delegation met with Bellatrix, representing Britain by herself. In old wood and stone, it was only the spartan nature of the surroundings that didn’t feel at home, as light filtered in through all the open windows, which had no glass, just opened shutters.</p><p>“Let me be plain with you,” Bellatrix explained, having listened to their presentations and appeals. “Since ancient times, Portugal and Britain have been allied nations. In this modern world, the disintegration of the modern order demands that we turn back to those ancient, time-tested bonds.”</p><p>“Portugese culture is the Celtic culture of Iberia. Portugal conquered the south out of Galicia, and northern Portugal remains deeply connected in the wizarding world to my own people—to many of you, nothing I am saying here is a surprise. It’s the stated political policy of my sister, the Duchess of Lancaster, to realise the unification of the peoples who still have a tangible connection to their Celtic heritage. That certainly includes northern Portugal—but we, as the British state, have no interest in dismembering one of our oldest allies. I also know that many of you are in fact from Porto yourselves, because of the nuclear devastation of Lisbon. The magical cultures of our people are linked. That should matter, and it <em>does </em>matter. So how do we handle the essential problem? What will we do to protect Portugal in this situation, and link Portugal into our system of alliances? How do we make sure the interests of the north are kept safe in the future configuration of the Portuguese state? I would suggest that in terms of autonomy, of national prestige, support for economic reconstruction, and national defence, the straightforward solution would be to proclaim His Majesty, King Charles, the Protector of Portugal.”</p><p>Probably Bella’s hardest challenge in making that speech was avoiding getting a tremendous big grin at the end. She had far too much fun thinking of how she had just mentally kicked a can over inside of all their brains. Narcissa would have said something like ‘following through with the necessary consequences of the nuclear wars’, and Hermione would have talked about how people were returning to older, more familiar forms of government under the pressure and fear of integrating the magical community directly. Bellatrix mostly just thought that it was absolutely amazing that she had been given the opportunity to tell the Portuguese government, such as it was, that they should seek a dynastic union with Britain.</p><p>From the eruption of voices in the room, expressions of shock and wonder, she had placed a lightning rod perfectly, an idea that would attract, but nobody else would have dare first spoken. The witches and wizards of Portugal had no context in the modern world to oppose it. The rest, perhaps, understood that they simply did not have many options, and that people wanted food and security more than anything else.</p><p>“I will draft your own proposal on the basis of Protection,” Bellatrix declared with a generous nod, and rose. Having kicked over the ant-hill, it would be very unwise to keep pressing. She retreated from the room, her duster fluttering behind her like a cape, and went to her guards. “Make sure they are given plentiful food and drink, and taken to their quarters at the end of the day, but they’re not to be allowed to dismiss themselves, to leave, or otherwise to end the proceedings until they have an agreement. Consider it a sequestration.”</p><p>“Of course, M’lady.” The soldiers were just as amused as she was.</p><p>Bellatrix was sure that had happened before in European history, but she couldn’t quite remember. <em>Hermione will probably know. </em></p><p>Hermione.</p><p>The telecaster was sparking and spinning when she got to her office, and she made haste to it, seizing control of it with her wand. The image of <em>Andy </em>immediately resolved. “...Has something happened to Cissy?” Bella asked, an abrupt stabbing of fear dissipating her pleasant mood.</p><p>“No, she’s just very busy with things, and knew you were probably in meetings, but this was so urgent that she asked me to keep contacting you non-stop until you answered. She wants you to come back to London. Voldemort has launched a major offensive, and he may very well break through to Ararat. We’re trying to pull together our strategy for how it’s actually possible to defeat him, and she wants you there. The Spanish front has been brought under control; and so, we can’t spare you there anymore. It’s come, the time has come.”</p><p>Bellatrix nodded once. Suddenly, the weight of facing her former master crashed down, and her throat was sore and hoarse, remembering the ruined waif of a great witch she had been when she had been rescued by him from Azkaban. That was the act which, in the end, she had repaid with betrayal. <em>If you regret that, you will die. It will be your destruction. </em></p><p>So there was no time for regrets. There never had been, in all of her life. “I’ll make forthwith for London.” At least, after all, it guaranteed that she’d see Hermione at least one more time.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The MinKol wizards and witches assigned to the 25<sup>th</sup> Army Corps were as invisible as the others behind their masks, impermeable suits, and anti-gas cloaks. Alexandra’s wizard protection forces linked up with them in groups, waiting for the signal to join hands, and endure the gruelling experience of sidealong apparation one more time, into battle.</p><p>She looked at her chrono and checked the time. “Comrades, don your masks!” She repeated, to trenchantly remind any of them who were waiting until the last second, and then stepped forward toward the front wall of the trench. A trench periscope was in place, but she didn’t look through it, she rather liked having her sight left.</p><p>The enemy artillery was still hammering them, and their own remained silent, concealed. They would let one single battery of guns do the talking, first. The sun blinked through clouds of smoke and dust, and soon enough, for all the madness of a daytime offensive, it would have competition.</p><p>“Fifteen…”</p><p>“Fourteen…”</p><p>Some men nervously tightened the straps on their gas masks again, just to make sure the seal was complete. Some crossed themselves. Others prayed aloud:</p><p>“<em>The dark clouds of life bring no terror to those in whose hearts your fire is burning brightly. Outside is the darkness, terror and howling of the storm; but in the heart, in the presence of Christ, there is light, peace and silence: Alleluia!</em>”</p><p>The troops looked at her as she passed, with body language which she could read even through their full gear--some cold and fixed, or bright and confident. A few glares through the masks—<em>why are we doing this?--</em>the appeals always had trouble with some, but they would attack nonetheless. Some promised to see their command in Tatvan, with a jaunty coolness. Some just saluted, as she took up her place, she could know none of them…</p><p>“Three…”</p><p>She reached her place and pushed herself hard into the dirt wall of the trench, to minimise the exposure to the ionising sleet of neutron radiation which would be emitted from the bombs. Her hand slipped down to rest on air horn fixed to her belt; in masks, there was no using a whistle.</p><p>Shells crashed around them until the last minute, the enemy hammering them as the units on both flanks were routed, as the Morsmordre turned their attention against the 25<sup> th </sup> Corps. Their own artillery opened up, a thunderous roar across the horizon from concealed positions—counterbattery fire.</p><p>MinKol personnel were stationed among them, they were casting shields against magical warnings, so the enemy could not know that mixed into the conventional counterbattery fire, the heavy guns had joined in, and lobbed their tactical warheads.</p><p>Alexandra pushed in closer against the wall of the trench and waited, mentally calculating the range, the flight of the shells, tearing at supersonic velocity through the air, one more conventional payload.</p><p>She looked down, and everyone looked down. The shadows shifted abruptly, lengthening and stretching. A white glare cast itself malignantly over the lip of the trench, and pushed their shadows onto the far wall. The harsh relief of white and darkness below her, of shadow and the brilliance of a thousand suns, told her, told everyone, all that they needed to know.</p><p>The shadows shifted, and shifted again, and again. <em>Another, another, another. </em>The soldiers whispered prayers. There was the roar of artillery around them—shells falling, the thunder of a distant cannonade—which might be coming from guns that had already been destroyed, men ripped to their component molecules, seconds ago.</p><p>Seconds passed. The terrified roar tore through the air. A cloud of dust blew across the trench, whipped by a furious wind that tugged at them. She had trouble drawing breath through the filter of her mask against the back-pressure in the very atmosphere around her. The dust hovered in place, and then exploded outwards, and with it, scrubs, limbs of fallen trees, ephemeral garbage of the Army’s defensive position, went fluttering and flying above them. The roar cascaded into the roar of more bombs. Eight bombs. <em>Eight bombs, </em> slamming in an interlocking grid into the enemy position, a claw of death to rip the heart of their lines and to subject their horde of Inferi to a nuclear hellfire against which the undead had no defence. Then.. <em>Ten… Twelve… </em>And then the light flashed out and over again, a terrible new flash erupting through the sky, distant, but more intense.</p><p>Alexandra’s eyes widened for a moment. <em>Big ones. They used some big ones. </em> She hadn’t been told. The secrecy around them had been total. They must have been slipped in right behind the others, using short-range ballistic missiles, in the midst of the chaos and the interference of the defensive missiles from the first group. Three. <em>Fifteen. God. Fifteen. </em>They ripped through the ground ahead with terrible deep roars, she could feel the earth shake, the clods of dirt dislodged from the walls of the trench by the shaking in the earth, toppling to the ground, dusting her boots in soil.</p><p>The brilliant lights began to dissipate. The main group of bombs were only 5kT each, tactical weapons for 18cm artillery. But twelve of them in the same place… Had torn precise gaps in the front, while to the rear, the larger detonations caused mass chaos and disruption to prevent the easy response of the Morsmordre reserves supporting their offensive.</p><p>With the nuclear strikes over, the Russian conventional artillery now immediately laid down patterns of nerve gas shells on the enemy artillery to suppress them, the guns opening up moment the fireballs began to fade, the heavy S-23s shifting from nuclear to chemical shells. The greater mushroom clouds, the three greater ones further to the rear, rose higher and higher, flickering with unnatural light, silhouetting the work of the gunners laying their guns with a malevolent triad of red-smoke columns rising ever further skyward.</p><p>And Alexandra swung around, grabbed the ladder, and climbed out of the trench. She activated her air horn, letting it scream again, and again, and again, with her hand thrust up into the air with a pistol more as a symbol than anything else. Around her, the world was abruptly silent, as silent as peace. The enemy artillery had just been gutted, their hordes of Inferi sent on fire, the wind had carried away the roar of the nukes.</p><p>Then the cacophony of the artillery firing nerve gas and conventional explosives downrange tore back through the air. The shouts of thousands of voices, the screams of alert sirens, the snort of revving diesels. An army, out of its concealed defensive positions, <em>came alive.</em></p><p>“<em>Za Rodinu! Ura!” </em>They swarmed out of the trenches into their assembly positions. What were their objectives? Where were they to apparate? They had to exploit holes in the enemy positions. Each one of the attack groups chained together, hand to hand, shoulder to shoulder, and apparated deep into the enemy lines. Their support would be coming, protected as best as they could be from the radioactive sleet by the steel walls of their tanks and APCs.</p><p>The regular troops had a simple objective: Seize the holes in the enemy’s lines and push on to link up with the Wizard assault squads. To accomplish this, per the plan, and per the locations Alexandra had briefed and sent her troops into with the MinKol personnel, required the objective of the regular troops to be simple, clear, and brutal.</p><p>The plan went like this – <em>Advance through the hypocentre of the fireballs. Keep your armoured vehicles buttoned up and your positive pressure suits on. Keep your masks on, even with the hull buttoned up; </em> <em>you won’t have enough time to don them if your tank is breached, before you breathe in a fatal dose</em> <em>. Drive hard, drive fast. Spend as little time inside of the perimeter as possible. Get to the other side, and assault the enemy rear-areas before they can reestablish the line. </em> <em>Link up with the MinKol forces, follow their orders. Don’t stop advancing until you are dead or receive orders to consolidate.</em></p><p>In short: Do you see the fireball? Yes? Attack through it!</p><p>And to a man—and woman—they followed their orders.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Bellatrix knew that it mattered to Hermione. She knew that <em>Potter </em>mattered to Hermione. She remembered, distantly, having barely escaped from Azkaban, the clouded feeling in her memories, the way she had mockingly told him how to use the Cruciatus Curse, when he had tried to use it against her—and failed. But, for all that it had been mocking, she was resolutely convinced that she had meant it. Bellatrix tried to extend a measure of respect to all her enemies. If the boy had mustered the hate to inflict pain on her—let him try his best.</p><p>Now, that feeling was faintly embarrassing, not because she was embarrassed for causing pain, or because she was embarrassed at the prospect of feeling it (she had certainly felt enough in her life), but because she felt the entire episode silly. After six years of trying to rule the world and failing, and destroying a lot of it, and defecting, and leading massive armies, one’s time as, in the grand scheme of the entire world, a terrorist, came off pathetic simply for how <em>minor </em>it was. How little, in the end, any one action had changed things.</p><p>The Battle of Hogwarts had not been the grand finale of a war, it had been the <em>beginning, </em>and even by the standards of magical mobilisation in this conflict only, not counting the muggles, it had barely been a skirmish. It would be remembered for what it meant to all the things that came after it, not for anything else.</p><p>And now she had to put the last demon to rest. Arriving in London via Portkey, she had commandeered a dressing room at the Ministry and completely changed into her dress uniform. The peaked cap, the skirt, the baton, the boots, the full works. No dragonskin armoured corset in sight. No attempts to hide her golden artificial arm—not, anyway, after she doffed her gloves on her arrival at 10 Downing Street. It was probably the first time she had actually turned herself out as fully Regulation to her British Army uniform, and it was the first time she had worn the uniform of a Field Marshal.</p><p>With her staff alongside her, arriving in cars sent to Diagon by the Government, she looked exactly like a professional military officer, and only the wand at her side instead of a sword and the fact she was, after all, a woman of predominantly (in modern terms) Franco-Welsh extraction who stood barely 5’2”, marked her as unusual. The guards and security and the staff at 10 Downing Street knew that this woman was always welcome; Narcissa’s instructions had been explicit.</p><p><em>So let us see Potter, brought back to life by the Waters. </em> She doffed her hat, tucked it under her left arm, and strode in, and up to the Cabinet Room, where Narcissa was meeting and planning the operation which would either defeat Voldemort and soon, or likely get them all killed. <em>Or worse, </em>she thought back to Ararat, and shuddered; there was no more need to think of it, for now.</p><p>“Field Marshal Lady Black.”</p><p>The room went silent. The doors opened. Bellatrix doffed her gloves next, and presented herself to the table, with a salute for Narcissa. “Your Grace.”</p><p>Harry stared.</p><p>Bellatrix couldn’t resist. “Lord Potter.” She dipped her head, and made her way to Hermione, who was as tense as a mouse in the shadow of a hawk. But it was Harry’s eyes who followed Bellatrix like the eyes of a hawk.</p><p>Bellatrix very deliberately sat down in the chair next to Hermione, and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. Her appearance was awful, and it was sincere, not show, when she asked her lover, “that must have been awful, because you look it.”</p><p>“I’m still a little sick, Bella,” Hermione mumbled, the trance broken. “It was. But. Thank you.”</p><p>The elder woman now wondered if Hermione had been afraid of her doing something stupid in front of Harry, so afraid that, alone, was what had her on edge.</p><p><em>Well, that’s a reminder of your reputation. </em>She reached up, gently put her gold artificial hand on Hermione’s shoulder; Hermione brought one of her hands up, and clapped it over, the feeling remaining almost exactly like a real arm, a real hand. Almost.</p><p><em>Good enough. Don’t bitch about it. </em>Bellatrix flashed a smile. “So, Cissy, we’re planning for the final operation against Riddle?”</p><p>A sigh, and a gentle hum of confidence, slipped out of Hermione. Bella could feel her relax more completely. A good sign…</p><p>“We are. We’re also digesting unfortunate, and rather significant, information that he may have already been in contact, or made a deal, with the power in the base of Ararat—Azi Dahaka. The city of Diyarbakir has been extirpated, and Hermione...”</p><p>Her girlfriend swallowed, while leaning against her. “Yes, I remember from the stories the Priests told, when I lived in the temple in the – dream. He has extinguished entire cities before. But the true dark power is not at hand—killing and raising the dead is different than what it does, and the power that it lends to its servants.”</p><p>“Eating souls, just like a Dementor,” Bellatrix murmured. “Yes. But we must have a way to stop this—I mean, Kaveh the Blacksmith stopped this monster before! Must have been one hell of a wizard blacksmith…”</p><p>There was silence. Bellatrix looked around, left and right, down the table. <em>Did I say something wrong? </em>Her own confidence was perhaps overstated… She smiled tightly.</p><p>It was Luna who spoke next, and she quoted, at length, from a text she had quietly produced:</p><p>“In Old Iran, the story of Zahhak begins with that of Jamshid, a legendary king who had led Iran magnanimously for seven hundred years and brought about peace and justice, civilisation, sanitation and health, arts and splendour, joy and prosperity, by the grace of God during his reign. But his success eventually led to pride and arrogance. He thus demanded to be recognized not only as the ruler of the world, but its creator. The arrogance marked his downfall as God withdrew the divine fortune of Jamshid’s reign.”</p><p>“Zahhak was once a man, a noble Arab deceived by the Lord of Serpents, the Darkness Between the Stars, to kill his father Merdas, to acquire his fortune and power. The Lord of Serpents guided Zahhak in treacherously killing his father; Zahhak became the ruler. The Lord of Serpents then kissed the new king’s shoulders to bless him, and disappeared. Two black snakes appeared where the Serpent’s lips had touched him. The snakes could not be removed, as new ones would replace them as soon as they were cut off. All physicians and healers in the realm proved powerless to deal with the snakes. When Zahhak begged of his power to relieve him of the suffering and threats of the snakes, he was told he must sacrifice the mind and essence of a young man to each snake each day for all time.”</p><p>“At the time that Jamshid lost his divine favour, Zahhak took the opportunity to attack Iran. Jamshid was defeated, escaped, and remained in hiding for a hundred years. He was finally caught and on Zahhak’s order cut in half. Zahhak claimed Jamshid’s throne. He ruled as an evil tyrant for one thousand years and killed many innocent young people to satisfy the snakes, during which the land was covered in a cloak of gloom. One night he dreamed that three warriors attacked, bound, and dragged him to Mount Damavand near Tehran as a cheering crowd followed. It would be the youngest who struck the decisive blow, with a golden mace. The dream terrified Zahhak and he consulted many wise men and dream interpreters. A brave one finally interpreted that Zahhak’s days were numbered, and a new king, Feraydun, would overthrow him. It is said he would be found in a meadow in the mountains north of Iran; but north of Iran there are many meadows, and many mountains. Zahhak hunted widely for Feraydun with spies and assassins he sent all through the north, and finally found him, as a young boy who was being nursed by the magic cow Barmāyeh, whose every hair is a different colour, in a high mountain meadow. Feraydun’s mother flees with him, and so Zahhak’s men kill Barmāyeh, but do not kill the boy.”</p><p>Zahhak lives the next years in fear and suspicion, commanding all his courtiers and lords to make writings declaring his righteousness and kindness to all, that he saves them from greater evils. But a man named Kaveh, the blacksmith, has lost seven of his eight sons to the Serpent’s hunger. On the day his eighth and last son is arrested, he marched into Zahhak’s palace to loudly and openly protest the killing of eighth son as the previous seven were, to satisfy the demonic snakes. Taken aback at Kaveh’s fearlessness, Zahhak ordered Kaveh’s son be released, but asked Kaveh to recognize the king’s royal generosity, justice, and benevolence by signing the declaration of the King’s goodness that had already been signed by the leaders of the land. Kaveh tore up the document in rage upon reading it and scolded the stunned cowardly courtiers serving a demonic tyrant. Kaveh stormed out of the court with his son, hoisted his leather apron on an iron lance, and called upon people to join together to remove the tyrant. People listened and thus began Kaveh’s revolt, and his apron became the Dasht-e-Kaviani, the flag of Old Iran. He found Feraydun hiding in the Alborz Mountains.”</p><p>“Kaveh, his son, and his followers recognised the noble young man as their king. They rode for days and crossed Arvand River to reach Zahhak’s capital. They conquered the town and the palace and freed prisoners, but Zahhak and his army were away. When informed that his palace had been occupied, Zahhak and his great army rode to the capital, but were attacked by inhabitants from all corners, rising up against his power. He was finally subdued by a blow to the head by Feraydun, wielding the golden mace, with Kaveh and his son beside him (as Zahhak had dreamed, that three men would arrest him as the youngest delivers him the immobilizing blow). He was bound and taken to a cave under Mount Damavand, where he was imprisoned in chains.”</p><p>Luna finished delicately, and smiled with sweet earnestness toward Harry. “Harry Potter, I do think you are our Feraydun. If you wield the Golden Mace, I do not think you need a new wand to strike down Voldemort, even if he consorts with Azi Dahaka, the power, the Lord of the Ten Thousand Serpents who dwells in the Darkness Between the Stars.”</p><p>“Miss Lovegood,” Narcissa started, but Bellatrix watched as Hermione held up her hand.</p><p>“Actually, Your Grace… Bellatrix, do you remember the cattle? Inside of <em>Koschei’s Cloak of Gloom?</em>”</p><p>Hermione said it that way, and Bellatrix immediately felt that Luna’s words were immediately significant. It was true that Koschei’s realms were those of perpetual gloom, hidden beneath mountains pulled over them like a veil of non-euclidean geometry. And she remembered the herd of cattle… Bellatrix sat bolt upright. “You think Koschei’s herd is descended from Barmāyeh?”</p><p>Larissa looked from where she leaned against Draco’s shoulder, ever so tired. Her blue eyes gleamed. “There were golden weapons in Haldi’s temple. And it’s known that the <em>Dasht-e-Kaviani </em>was long lost, but reappeared, when native Persians threw off the reign of the Caliphs. Elahaïs would certainly know something of this, and was likely still alive at the time of the Saffarid revolt, when it’s said that Ya’qub al-Saffar hung out the Dasht-e-Kaviani in revolt. If the Temple of Haldi held the Mace of Feraydun it would explain why there were the ritual processions from it to Sacred Ararat, and it would be the place that the <em>Dasht-e-Kaviani </em>was kept safe from Alexander the Great.”</p><p>“And…” Larissa let the word linger for a moment. “Koschei used horcruxes, like Voldemort. Voldemort wanted to keep the last fragments of his soul away from Ararat. There is a certain logic—your soul cannot be consumed, if it is not all there to be eaten… Oh, and one more thing, Bellatrix.”</p><p>She shot a look at the Russian woman. “Yes?”</p><p>“The legend of the Snake Princess says that Koschei turned a Princess into a snake. When the Cossack saves the snake-princess from the fire, she begs him to carry her for seven years, and journey to the island of Tin. We’re on the island of tin right now, right?”</p><p>“...Yes, Britain was the land of tin in ancient times. Cornwall,” Bellatrix answered automatically. Narcissa was now looking more interestedly, and Hermione hung onto each word, like she were trying to mentally tear them apart and slot in the pieces.</p><p>“Snake-Princess,” Larissa mused. “Your plan with Nagini, much?”</p><p>“Hah!” Bella couldn’t help it, she exclaimed and grinned.</p><p>“Right well,” Larissa pointed Luna. “There’s one more point about the legend of Zahhak. He corrupted the two daughters of Jamshid to be dark sorceresses who served him--Shahrnaz and Arnavaz. They were redeemed by Feraydun on the hour of his triumph. It <em>is the law, </em>that events of history reoccur in cycles, the Gunas of the Ages. I believe that as the Lord of Serpents enslaved Shahrnaz and Arnavaz as his servants, and Koschei imprisoned the Snake Princess, it is fate to free Nagini on the hour of the Dark Lord’s defeat.”</p><p>Bellatrix sank back, breathing slowly and steadily. “What else is part of that story, Larissa?”</p><p>“The cossack asks for the keg that becomes a palace, as his reward, at the advice of the snake-princess. The keg that becomes a palace leads to his claiming the self-slaying sword. With admittedly some underhanded murder.” Larissa rubbed her forehead.</p><p>“Mmmnn… Sounds promising.” Bellatrix leaned forward, but she saw Hermione shaking her head out of the corner of her eye.</p><p>“If the self-slaying sword—the Golden Mace—is just sitting there in the hidden city—if that’s how to interpret palace-in-the-keg,” Hermione objected, “then how would we need Nagini’s help to gain it? Larissa could just go <em>take it, </em>as a Priestess of Haldi. Just go to Musasir and take it.”</p><p>“Then maybe the keg that becomes a palace isn’t the city of Musasir, and the Golden Mace isn’t there. Musasir is hardly the only legend of a hidden city in the East; the area is rife with them,” Narcissa sighed. “And it’s all supposition.”</p><p>“It’s not supposition. The Gunas do come and go, Your Grace,” Luna murmured, looking intently at Bellatrix. “The problem,” she said, and she said it in a voice that made even Bellatrix a little uneasy, “is that we lack information.”</p><p>“About?” A little uneasy, but not enough for Bellatrix to decide she needed to avoid snapping back.</p><p>“Tying the pieces together, like a snake in a knot,” Luna nodded, quite seriously.</p><p>“Nagini. You want <em>information </em>from Nagini.” Bellatrix held her head, closing her eyes, thinking. “Well, actually. You know, I was always curious what Riddle was up to with Nagini, even when … Even when he was my master, I wanted to <em>know. </em>And I did piece together her history, the terrible fate of being a Maledicta,” Bellatrix did shudder at that, being trapped in the body of a snake but still sapient sounded like it would be just as bad as Azkaban, “and a bit of her life before that. She actually travelled, for a while, with Newt Scamander, around the time of Grindelwald’s wars. She may very well know the location of something relevant to this—I mean, that rogue Scamander,” she supposed it was a bit hypocritical of her, but still, “did manage to get up to a lot.”</p><p>“This requires we assume the myths about Koschei and Zahhak repeat, and contain clues.” Hermione wasn’t going to just follow along with that without pushing it, hard. “If we assume that the myths about Koschei are also myths about Zahhak, or Azi Dahaka…” Hermione looked to Larissa, face studious. “Problem, though. Koschei wanted immortality. He wanted the Water of Life at the top of the lake. Elahaïs was clear about that.”</p><p>“But he also wanted more. I rode in his army in those same days,” Bellatrix countered to her. “It’s…”</p><p>“It’s simple,” Luna was so sweet. So, so unnervingly sweet. “In the old Iranian legends, Zahhak begs Anahita for the power to kill all human life on the planet. He sacrifices countless human lives to her, over and above the two he had to feed to his serpents each day. But she will not grant him this wish, no matter how much he sacrifices.”</p><p>“But she was a Goddess of light!” Hermione exclaimed, her eyes flaring. “I’ve <em>prayed </em>to her.”</p><p>“Indeed! But she is at the top of the mountain.”</p><p>Bellatrix’s eyes narrowed. “As long as the Lake is there, the Door cannot complete the destruction of Earth.”</p><p>“Mm-hmm.”</p><p>“He may well have sought to be a Dark Lord, then. The real source of the Lake’s power is the Simurgh, and we don’t know what happens to the Simurgh on the days the Simurgh does not rise,” Bellatrix nodded slowly, a lip caught in her teeth for a moment. Hands playing uncomfortably with her tangled dark hair. “So, Nagini.”</p><p>“If we need Nagini to get the final piece of the puzzle, <em>how</em>?” Harry finally spoke up. “She’s right next to Voldemort, at all times, even now.”</p><p>“Not if he descends into the mountain. She’s a horcrux. He won’t dare bring his last horcrux,” <em>now that you aren’t one, finally, and only thanks to the Baba Yaga and the Water of Death, </em>Bellatrix did not say out loud, “into the mountain. So I have a window. I could seize her by launching a raid on the remaining Death Eaters at his headquarters and take her to the Lake of Anahit at the <em>same time </em>he is presenting himself before the Door. Simply sealing the pact won’t destroy the Earth, he wants to conquer and rule for a thousand years as Zahhak did, we’ll have an opportunity.”</p><p>“But if we wait that long, he may become unstoppable,” Ron briefly glared.</p><p>A tight smile from Bellatrix was all he got back, her eyes gleaming with a sharp confidence. “He might. But Zahhak was stopped after a thousand years in power as Azi Dahaka’s servant. I think we can take our chances.”</p><p>“Well, I’d hope you would think that way, Kaveh.” Luna said.</p><p><em>Of course. </em>She had raised the banner of revolt—when no means of victory was in sight.</p><p>Unspoken in the story of Kaveh was that he had lived his entire life under Zahhak’s power and not complained until the very last moment he had to redeem himself--the chance to save his last surviving child. He had not resisted the human sacrifice of his first seven sons.</p><p>It had taken him a long time to become a hero.</p><p>Harry was Feraydun.</p><p>Bellatrix was Kaveh Āhangar.</p><p>And Luna saw it clearly.</p><p>Bellatrix, being Bellatrix, just thought--<em>so, is Hermione my son, then? Kinky. </em></p><p>But she was ready to raid her former Lord's camp, at all hazards. She had raised the <em>Dasht-e-Kaviani, </em>and she would never look back.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>All of the mythological references are taken from various versions of Koschei's stories in Russian folk-tales, and from the Iranian Book of Kings, and Zoroastrian mythology and folk tales; they are woven together from these sources, without any embellishment in the recounting here, so that I square the circle based on the real myth, albeit with the singular assumption that Zahhak represents the corrupted mortal avatar of Azi Dahaka, as the true Darkness Between the Stars, the Lord of Ten Thousand Serpents.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0094"><h2>94. The Last Night</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>
    <span>The Last Night</span>
  </strong>
</p><p>
  <span>At that moment, as Hermione was assessing the situation, a figure silently stepped out of the shadows along the back wall. Dignified and white-haired, with sad eyes. Bellatrix looked up and recognised her, and through the fog of exhaustion and emotional hardship, Hermione’s brain clicked, and she did as well.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>Tamar Dadiani. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>But, if she’s here… Oh, oh.</em>
</p><p>“Best for you not to go alone on the raid to seize Nagini,” she addressed Bellatrix.</p><p>“If anything goes even slightly wrong, it will mean our deaths,” Bellatrix tossed her head back and looked up to regard her. Now, unlike when Bellatrix negotiated her defection, they were on much more even ground.</p><p>“Well, I am a widow, and I am trying to end the war that will consume the rest of my children, otherwise,” she answered.</p><p>Larissa silently buried her head against Draco.</p><p>“He was a good man,” Bellatrix acknowledged after a moment, turning away, biting her lip. “Delphini will be sad, when she hears of it.”</p><p>“He was glad to have one more daughter around to spoil,” Lady Tamar’s eyes shone with unshed tears.</p><p>Harry stiffened. “He…”</p><p>Tamar waved a hand. “He was unwell, Harry Potter. He has been unwell for decades. The trip to Chernobyl these brave young people undertook alongside him was not his first. He paid a price for that first one. It was a fair price, and he got to live for almost another twenty years. That’s all. There was certainly nothing you could do.”</p><p>Hermione thought it a gentle master-class in how to reassure someone, without explicitly lying to them and outright denying that their fears were, in fact, true.</p><p>Narcissa quietly looked around the table, set her cup down, smoothed at her skirt in her lap before bringing her hands back up. Hermione knew by now it was one of the few gestures of nervousness that she allowed herself. “I have a few concerns. The first one, Bella, is perhaps the most straightforward. Are you prepared for Nagini continuing to refuse to cooperate even if the Water of Life serves to heal her?”</p><p>“If I have to use the Imperious curse, I will.”</p><p>“But—” Harry started, before Narcissa cut him off.</p><p>“Necessity hath no law.”</p><p>Ron nodded in agreement to that, and Harry, seeing that, swallowed and fell silent.</p><p>“We’re relying on a <em>magical theory </em>of great events in history, that they constantly repeat in cycles, and that details of the current cycle can be discerned from the current cycle,” Narcissa said next. “What if it’s all simply wrong and the dreams and myths and legends all mean nothing?”</p><p>“If we deal with Nagini, one way or another, then Voldemort has no Horcruxes left,” Hermione offered, this time. “So, somebody gets him with an <em>Avada Kedavra </em>and he’s just as dead as someone else.”</p><p>“What if it’s important to keep him alive?”</p><p>Hermione blinked. “Your Grace, you mean the imprisonment of Zahhak?”</p><p>“Yes. What if that’s factual for a servant of Azi Dahaka, but the other myths are pure fluff? What if he cannot be killed, or trying to kill him has unforeseen consequences?”</p><p>
  <em>Narcissa is testing the plan with questions. </em>
  <span>Hermione thought it smart, and very much approved. “There are ways to bind someone who cannot die, forever, if it must be done. Zahhak was imprisoned in Ararat, and eventually went away, it seems. But for this we must speak with </span>
  <span>Elaha</span>
  <span>ïs, </span>
  <span>to be sure about the correct course of action.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Narcissa nodded. “Three groups, then. And two into dangerous territory. One to Koschei’s palace, to investigate what he had intended to do, and what he knew about Ararat. One to the temple. One, the raid on Riddle’s headquarters. They must all be conducted simultaneously. We will have very little time to act when we are done—and this information will guide us in our final actions.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them, composed and content with herself. “Most of you have had very little sleep in the past days, travelled hard and fast, and been wounded in battle, in some cases. Hermione, Bella, I encourage you to return to Ancient House by Floo. Pray at our family shrine. Spend some time with Delphini, and with each other. Leave tomorrow morning. I will stay up, making all the arrangements for all of you. Lord Potter, we will make arrangements for you to be comfortable. Bellatrix and Lady Tamara will go alone on the infiltration operation. Hermione, you will go to the Temple, with Luna. She will be best suited to have a clear understanding of what the ghost says. Tonks, I would ask you to accompany them. Colonel Weasley, please accompany Larissa and Lord Potter to Koschei’s palace.”</span>
</p><p>“<span>I’m going as well,” Draco said, quietly, and then more loudly. “I’m going as well, Mother. I won’t let her go alone again.”</span></p><p>
  <span>Narcissa put her hand to her head. But then she nodded. “No, you are right. You are engaged to be married, and I have held you back from protecting your intended wife already. I cannot do it again, not when these stakes are so grave. Draco … Stay safe, please, my dragon.” Her voice gently faded to barely more than a whisper, at that.</span>
</p><p>“<span>With all my power, Mother.”</span></p><p>
  <span>Andromeda, listening from one of the table, and silent up to that point, now softly cleared her throat. “We may want to keep </span>
  <em>Riddle </em>
  <span>guessing about which one of these operations is the most important. Dora, dear…?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Tonks’ head jerked up. “Mum?”</span>
</p><p>“<span>I once promised when you were little that your mother would not ask you to use your abilities. I’ve always kept that, until now, but… If I may make the suggestion, having Bellatrix be both at the Temple and at Riddle’s headquarters may, in fact, be quite useful for making him guess about what information we think is the most important.” </span></p><p>
  <span>Tonks looked down. Looked up, at Bellatrix. “I was always afraid there was a bit of Black crazy in me—no offence, Mum—and I could go off in your direction. Never thought I’d be you. Actually, it’s kinda the scariest thing I can think of. But here you are, and we’ve got to win. Got to take every take we can to win. I’ll do it. I can think of a few charms that can make my wand look like your’s.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Andromeda wiped at her eyes. “I’ll keep the kids safe; a promise to both of you, Bella, Dora—no matter what, you can be assured of it. Thank you, for giving me my family back…”</span>
</p><p>“<span>Enough of that.” Bella gently got up—kissed Hermione’s head—walked around, kissed her sister’s heads. Didn’t care that Narcissa was a little embarrassed, raised not to show such affection in public. Smiled, wiped at her eyes. Stepped back over to Hermione. “We’re going to Ancient House. And we’ll be ready on time.” </span></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span>How do you say goodbye to your daughter, perhaps forever, without telling her that? </span>
  <span>Bellatrix sat with Delphini on the low Egyptian couch off to the side of the Atrium, letting the height of late June warmth seep in. It was almost the Summer Solstice, and Bellatrix knew that light magic was waxing. </span>
  <em>Hmm, if we can force Riddle to fight on the Summer Solstice, the gate to the darkness may be at its weakest. His power certainly will be. </em>
</p><p>She ran her hands through her daughter’s hair, and glanced to Hermione for a moment, Hermione, the woman who had in the end given her back a beautiful life. Delphini … Hermione… There they all sat, a family. They’d had … Nine months, give or take. Nine months as a family. Long enough to give birth to a child in, long enough for a wonderful season, the equivalent of a single school year at Hogwarts.</p><p>Bellatrix sucked in her breath, pressed her fist to her lips, tried to tear her mind away from calculating and considering the complications of the next day. She was almost like Hermione at this point. And thinking about Riddle especially made her think of Delphini. She hoped that, personally, she didn’t end up being the one to kill him, simply because she never wanted Delphini to have to find that out, never wanted to have to explain to her what had happened.</p><p>“Mum?” Of course, now Delphini was looking at her, quizzically.</p><p>“I’m thinking about the future, dear. Mum is easily distracted,” Bellatrix answered, and leaned over to her daughter. March 12<sup>th</sup>, 1997, Delphini’s birthday. She was seven years old. Old enough to be reading (and reading adult books, at that!), to be exploring the world, four years from going to Hogwarts…</p><p>
  <em>Gods of my ancestors, I don’t ask to return alive, but I do ask that <b>one </b><span>of us return alive for her. </span></em>
</p><p>“<span>Mum is easily distracted but you’re going away tomorrow… again.” Delphi sighed gently against the warmth of her two parents, in the summer’s eve. “Will you be back for </span><span>the Solstice? Both of you?” </span></p><p>“<span><span>We’re going to try </span></span><em><span>very hard. </span></em><span><span>But Aunt Andromeda and Aunt Narcissa will lead the ceremonies no matter what.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>It’s not the same.” A pout. </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>It’s not,” Hermione agreed. “But it’s … Unfortunately, in these dark times, your mothers have to work to make the world a better place, and that’s just what it is.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>If father would just stop causing trouble, this would all stop.”</span></span></p><p>
  <em>
    <span>How the hell could you feel nothing at all for her? </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix wondered of Riddle, looking down at her daughter. Delphini had awakened something inside of her… But not inside of the Dark Lord. He seemed simply incapable of it. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Now he was bringing on a deal to enslave the entire world, and openly threatened his own daughter. He truly thought nothing of anyone but himself. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Thank the Gods she doesn’t share that disease. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>A part of Bellatrix felt the most magical dream of all was that she had a daughter worth saving and cherishing out of all of that madness. Her entire adult life up until the last two years, felt like some strange fever. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>It would,” Hermione was saying to Delphini gently. “But he doesn’t want to stop, so we have to keep trying to make him stop.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I don’t understand it.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I don’t either,” Bellatrix whispered. “I thought I did once, but I don’t. It’s best to just pray, that it all comes to a good ending, and we can spend time together with you, my dove. Now, dear, ‘Mione and I are going to have to put you to bed. But, we’ll stay with you, and read a quick story.”</span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The two women exchanged a pained glance. They knew that they might never well return, and this might be the last bedtime story. The chance that it would only be one of them reading the next one, was even higher. But there would be no peace until the war was done. There simply could be no peace, until the war was done. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Until Delphini’s biological father, who was manifestly incapable of loving her, was dead. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Perhaps a fear of Bellatrix’s greater than failure, was that they would succeed, and Delphi would never quite forgive them for it. </span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>After they had gotten Delphi to go to sleep, Hermione had curled up with her lover, in Bella’s childhood bed. Nestled together, they had slept through a fitful night, one more night in Ancient House. Pushed up close to Bellatrix (taking advantage of the fact that Bella’s left arm didn’t go numb when under her, which made it much easier for Bella to cuddle with someone in bed—Hermione was a little guilty that she was thankful for Bella’s artificial limb, but not </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>that </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>guilty), she was surprised with how well she had slept. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>It was, after all, a desperate time, and she felt unsettled and desperate. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Her body still hurt, and felt off-kilter, and sick. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>But it also reminded her so, so strongly of the time when she had first slept with Bellatrix, before going into the Crimean. She’d been just as desperate, and just as hopeless, then. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Almost involuntarily, she pressed against Bellatrix as they woke up. Bellatrix, the smaller woman… Hermione would probably never get over that. A sly grin curled her lips, even as she awoke. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I know what you’re thinking of,” Bella murmured, bemused, her voice with a playful lilt. “</span></span><span><span>The first time we had sex.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione flushed a little. “I am,” she admitted. “It felt more or less exactly like this. Here we are again, facing the end of everything if we lose.”</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>The stakes are higher now, actually,” she answered, and Hermione felt herself being pushed down as Bellatrix rolled over and nuzzled against her. “The past week has been a nightmare for you. Lay back.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>...Bella?” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>A husky, delighted laugh. “We ride for ruin </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>and the world’s ending t</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>oday, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>isn’t that how Luna would say it? – </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>so I am going to hear you moan, one more time.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Of course she’s horny and oh goddess… </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione trailed off as Bellatrix dived down, whispering between her legs, close to her sex. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Just for you today. Lighten your heart a little.” </span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Fuck—you deserve the same…”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>I choose to make you happy. I always make my own choices. That’s my choice, today.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The touch of her lips, the strokes of her tongue. Those words nearly made Hermione want to cry, and yet she was being pleasured, too, and she loved it. It was true. To Bellatrix it was never necessarily about her own pleasure, but it was </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>always </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>about her own choice. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>And who would have said no? She was being pampered, pleasured, by her hungry and fearless lover, all of her tension melting away into Bellatrix’s </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>tongue. She felt her legs pushed open, Bellatrix shifting, pressing down. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione’s hips rolled, her breath growing sharp—Bellatrix seemed everywhere, and the cool metal of an artificial hand on one thigh was no turn-off, but an electric arc of taut, cool skin with her hair standing on end. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Then, Bella’s hand slipped from her thigh to between her legs, at her sex, as the older woman’s lips and tongue migrated upwards, insistently stroking at Hermione’s centre. She gasped, and closed her eyes. Perhaps this moment would last forever, too, a forever of pleasure rather than …</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Oh, oh. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>She’d felt the gloves before, but not the cold metal fingers, as skilled as those of Bella’s living hand, but … Gold, sliding along her slick wetness of her skin, inside of her. So clever, so insistent, with a laugh on her lips as Bella pressed them down against Hermione’s clit, </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>and Hermione could feel it, feel the warmth, feel a tongue over her, a lap, a stroke, insistent and firm, intentionally crooked to one side—all the details mattered and Bella knew her so well by then. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Her head swam in a delightful way, and she lost her caring about other things, and stray thoughts entered her head and left again just as quickly, who gave a shit about them; and her hips bucked and then there were no thoughts at all, and Bellatrix pushed her lips down close and held them very close to her, and buried her face against Hermione’s clit, and stroked with her tongue while those golden fingers curled inside of her and kept her younger lover, kept </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>her, </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>going for as long as she damn well could, and Hermione cried and shifted and shuddered and arced her back. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Sank back down to the bed. Bellatrix rose up over her, full breasts hanging down, a grin, a glint in her eyes, and descended to plant a firm kiss to Hermione’s lips with her own, the ones that had just been between the younger woman’s legs. “Taste yourself,” she whispered, and then slid over to the side, laughing softly. “I’ll call for breakfast, love. And then we’ll be on our way.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix and </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Delphini</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>, all the reasons that she needed to live for. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix… Hermione laughed, and laughed at the irony, and opened her eyes and grinned. “I love you.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>There was nothing more to it.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>She squeezed and cuddled close to Bellatrix, and resolved to do her best to face her fate like Bellatrix, laughing and confident and uncaring, to the bitter end. </span>
  </span>
</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>A full breakfast. Thick, black tea on the stomach, with milk from one of the few countries where it was reliably safe to drink. Field uniform on, for both of them. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix settled her corset into place. No worrying about anything except survival, today. They left before Delphini woke up, neither one of them could bear the thought of inflicting another round of goodbyes on her. Let her have good memories of her mothers, not sad ones. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>They mustered with the others in the atrium of the Ministry. The others mustered as well. Narcissa was there, Andromeda was there, to see them off. To see them all off. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>The sun was still rising over London—just another day to the people of the battered city, still rebuilding after Voldemort’s punishment for their liberation. Mid-morning, promising to be a bright day, where children would find ways to be merry despite the rubble in the streets. With the government consolidated with Narcissa in 10 Downing Street, the Ministry felt somewhat empty at the moment. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>And Hermione and Bellatrix would be going on different assignments. Objectively, Hermione knew it was for the best. They were needed where they were needed, and it reduced the chance that both of them would fall at the same time. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Someone </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>would come home to Delphini.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Tamar stepped over. “Well.” She paused, and looked at Bellatrix—Bella’s sallow-set eyes staring right back.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>I hear you were considered one of the finest witches in Britain.”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Mmm, that’s her,” Bellatrix said, pointing at Hermione, eliciting a blush. “Or maybe her, or her,” Narcissa, Andy. “But for this, I think I’m very much the right woman for the job. I understand you’re no slouch yourself.” </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Tamar sniffed and laughed softly. “I suppose I have a reputation. Are you ready? We can all travel by international portkey to Yerevan. Then we will split up, Floo to Van for the Temple and Headquarters groups. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>We will both hold, and wait for Voldemort’s disposition before commencing our operation—we may be in Van for several days, and should be prepared to </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>wait</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> accordingly.</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>There was a slowly spreading chorus of acknowledgements. Only one person was missing—Tonks.</span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>And then she wasn’t missing anymore, or rather, she was, but there was a second Bellatrix. “Oi! Finding a dragonskin armour corset on short notice wasn’t easy,” she glared at Bella, her diction all Tonks, but her voice, all Bellatrix’s. “Good enough?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>Talk like your social class, and it will be fine,” Narcissa observed.</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>Hey—I </span></span><em><span>do.</span></em><span><span>”</span></span></p><p>“<span><span>No, you don’t, Dora,” Andy observed drolly, earning a glare from her daughter. </span></span></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Hermione stepped over to Harry. “Are you ready for this?” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>“<span><span>About as ready as I was for the Battle of Hogwarts, which is to say, not at all,” he replied with a sigh. He had </span></span><em><span>calmed, </span></em><span><span>steadied out, but was keeping close to Luna and Ginny; it was just now that Luna would be going with Hermione. </span></span><em><span>Well, Ginny will take good care of him, </span></em><span><span>Hermione thought with definite contentment. It was all she </span></span><em><span>could. </span></em></p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Bellatrix exchanged a few words softly with her sisters. Hermione had no idea what they were, and let them pass on the wind. She reached and squeezed Harry’s hand. “Just take care of yourself. I want you to see this through.” </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>A part of her was glad when Bellatrix didn’t come over to kiss her goodbye. </span>
  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Harry doesn’t need to see that, not right now. </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>And, they’d have a chance—at Van. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Checking wands and charms, potion vials and secondary weapons, they were as ready as they could get. It was time to go. Portkey to Moskva, Portkey to Yerevan. One more trip through the elegant 1930s Arrivals and Departures Hall at the Moskva Ministry. A chance for some Russian tea, though there would probably be more in Yerevan; when all the rest of civilisation was gone, the Transcaucasus would still have tea and tobacco, likely enough. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>But the Manor ‘Content’ would never have a kindly and smiling gentleman in it again, ready to welcome them with magic on a dark and snowy night. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Fuck, but I am done with this war. For all the sacrifices we made, voluntary or not, it must end. </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Oh what a sight it was! If they were all dead tomorrow, they would have lived to accomplish such a feat of arms as this! Dirt and rock fused to glass ahead of them, a sign that they had overrun the enemy positions—not just cut through the columns, where the tactical nukes had been detonated, but reached the second line, where the larger devices had torn through the rear-areas of the Morsmordre Army! </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>Alexandra stood on the flank of the volcanic crater of the Nemrut Dagi. She could see, to her east, the plunge from the sharp cliffs of the inside crater wall down to the lake it held within. To the west, she could see their position on the right, which was being hammered by enemy artillery as the enemy threw reinforcements at them, trying to halt the counterattack. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>
    <span>To the south, she could see Tatvan, and the troops of the 25</span>
  </span>
  <sup>
    <span>
      <span>th</span>
    </span>
  </sup>
  <span>
    <span> Corps linking up with the 16</span>
  </span>
  <sup>
    <span>
      <span>th</span>
    </span>
  </sup>
  <span>
    <span> Mongolian division. They had, against all odds, succeeded. Their position was a massive salient, true, but anchored on one side by the lake, they now held the high ground of these slopes, and could defend Tatvan with ease. Their ships on the lake could even be made out, standing close to True Ararat, as they now mostly called the mountain. </span>
  </span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Are you broken? Is this your last attempt? </span>
  </em>
  <span>
    <span>There was still enemy artillery firing in their general direction, though lower down the flanks of the mountain, so she crouched lower. </span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span>Zoë</span>
  </span>
  <span>
    <span> came up to her then, and with a few flicks of her wand and Aramaic spells, created a mixture of rubble and rock and trenches as an observation and command position for them. It was certainly much faster than digging! </span>
  </span>
</p><p>Soon enough, Alexandra’s staff had the radios set up, and some camouflage netting over the position. By that point, someone had gotten some tea going, and the two women drank of it, hot strong tea in the hot desert, the better to make you sweat by, with camouflage netting for shade. It was getting on toward evening, and they’d been in combat continuously for thirty hours without sleep. Emergency rations were broken open and distributed.</p><p>The two women set together, and used binoculars and a range-finder scope to look to the west. Zoë sometimes augmented it with her wand. They could look up the valley, toward the city of Muş, still in the hands of Voldemort’s troops despite the counterattack. There was a low black cloud seeming to cover the ground, like the approach of a swarm of locusts.</p><p>“More Inferi,” Zoë remarked at last, a touch grimly, having played about with casting spells on an indicator board. “It matches what I can see.”</p><p>“How many does he have,” Alexandra mused, and it wasn’t really a question, just a bitter remark. He surely must have raised most of the dead in east Anatolia, it seemed like. All the ones who still had bodies left to desecrate. <em>Perhaps the religions which practice cremation have always been wiser. </em></p><p>“I heard reports during the advance that he had taken an entire city to use—Diyarbakir,” Zoë answered with quiet grimness. “So, he will set them all upon us, right now. Pin us, and then pivot his actual troops up the D959 highway, to cut us off and reach the Mountain. It must be his only objective; it is the only thing that can be.”</p><p>For a moment, Alexandra looked again at the horde, and felt an intense impulse toward despair. If there were a million undead in it, it would surely be surprising, in the wrong direction. It was probably a million and a half.</p><p>Then she heard the mutters and murmurs of the men behind her, and turned. They were alive with a weary awe, and…</p><p>“The Simurgh.” Even in the midst of all this, with Voldemort on the offensive toward the Mountain, the Simurgh still rose from the Lake of Anahit, and flew forth in random directions, blessing the land with healing and the people in it with nurturing to their hearts and souls from the sight of the great bird. Now, it was returning, with the dusk, to the lake. They watched it disappear into the high crater of True Ararat, and Zoë was smiling for the sight of the shining bird, and knelt and kissed the Earth.</p><p>“Sometimes, the world is kind, and reminds you to fight on, for the sake of hope.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Dolohov’s Master stood his ground in Muş. Like Diyarbakir, the city was now quite dead. But this close to the front, the number of reinforcements to the horrifying ranks of the Inferi that they had received were thin; most of the population had already fled, even muggles possessing that basic wisdom.</p><p>“These Russians, wizards and muggles alike, do not know how to quit,” Voldemort glanced to him. “Your kin, I might add.”</p><p>“<span><span>Eh, </span></span><span><span>to beg your pardon, </span></span><span><span>My Lord, I went to Durmstrang. But they do not surrender, though I had not expected a counterattack. But, it’s a wasted hope, and a sure defeat. We can cut them off.”</span></span></p><p>“My good man?” Voldemort stared at him, and Dolohov realised he was already distracted from the battle again.</p><p>“Sire, as the Inferi converge to attack them, we can use our remaining Janissary divisions to pinch their right flank. We will cut them off from the rest of their lines, and reach Lake Van. Let them have their momentary victory, they can’t bring up their strategic reserves fast enough, and they don’t have enough to plug the gap, anyway.”</p><p>“That may be… That may be. Yes, you may issue those orders.”</p><p>“By your leave?”</p><p>“Hurry back, I have more important matters to deal with.” Voldemort was looking, longingly, toward Ararat. He sneered in contempt, when the Simurgh appeared. “Not long, and you will have no place to sleep,” he whispered, barely more than a hiss.</p><p>Dolohov hastily finished giving the orders, and acknowledged the salute, before turning back. One could never keep the Dark Lord waiting, after all. “Sire, the instructions have been given. They will surely be at the foot of Ararat within a day. This will be remembered as the enemy’s last offensive, which you crushed, in personal command of your troops.” A little flattery never hurt, around Voldemort.</p><p>“Oh, they will forget this day’s military noise and to-do soon enough,” the Dark Lord answered. “We have a more important thing to do. It’s time to seal the deal.”</p><p>“M’lord, the enemy still holds the position.”</p><p>“The troops are coming up, they only have to arrive soon enough to support us. And, they are unlikely to find us at first, when we are travelling the path of Darkness. My good man, I am going to give you a reward, the finest of all rewards. You are going to be the one who pulls me back from the brink—it is impossible to seal this deal, with Azi Dahaka, except if you have someone with you, who is loyal enough to do their part. You stand alone with me as a competent and able subordinate, now. You will be remembered as my foremost Lieutenant and the Ministry of the Whole World, when I am done.”</p><p>Dolohov was not sure anymore if he wanted such distinctions. But it was quite clear that he was much too far in to look for a path out. Unlike Bellatrix.</p><p>“M’Lord, if you mean for me to accompany you on a risky mission behind enemy lines, I am pleased to follow, but who shall be left in command of the Army?”</p><p>“Let your muggle Chief of Staff handle it. I am sure he can, and the muggles have certainly proved very adept at killing,” Voldemort shrugged.</p><p>A pause. “But, M’lord, Nagini?”</p><p>Voldemort frowned. “The risk to Nagini,” he allowed at last, “is greater to be near Ararat. She is not to approach closer than Muş, in any circumstance. Pull back a cordon of our Aurors to protect the camp. But that is all. You are not… Nervous, are you?” He smiled, trenchantly.</p><p>“Absolutely not, My Lord. You know I am loyal, and I will do this thing for you, even though I understand it not.”</p><p>“Good. Good. It is almost time for us to be done with treason and rebellion forever. In later years, I will certainly remember how much of it I suffered. But the little trap we have laid for them, should hold them off long enough for it to never matter again.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0095"><h2>95. You Have Been Judged.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>You Have Been Judged</strong>
</p><p>They had parted ways with Harry and his team in Yerevan. The Floo to Van had been hastily established, across the international border, by a team of Russian Goblins, working in magical military engineering. Many casualties were brought back directly through it to be treated in Yerevan's hospitals, which were mostly intact. Muggles, the majority of them, magic being used to save their lives.</p><p>Hermione couldn't help but imagine that Grindelwald would have loved every minute of this. In fact, Narcissa's government would have brought at least grudging approval from him, in Britain, or at least she was convinced of it.</p><p>They had been in the city of Van before, in fact, they had been in this same hotel before, and when they arrived, it felt distinctly weird for Hermione. The idea of being in the same place more than once was somewhat novel at this point; she could count the number of places on her fingers that had any kind of permanency for her. Being in the field felt so much more normal.</p><p>The water of the lake remained just as inviting as it had the year before, but, across on the other side, sixty miles away and out of sight, was nonetheless the steady drumbeat of artillery. The brown mountains to the north and south, flecked with green and white, the fields that still had orchards and wheat around the cities—they might have all had a beautiful splendour, no, they did, but the dull <em>crump </em>on the horizon of big guns firing as fast as they could muted it. The looming presence of True Ararat to the west northwest was another reminder of precisely what they had come for, wavering slightly, as if some remnant of the power which had concealed it had remained—or perhaps it was a just a trick of refraction, from the sunlight glinting off the waters of the lake.</p><p>Bellatrix interrupted her, then, stepping close. "No use looking to the west. We know he's on the move. We know they're fighting for their lives. Let's have some tea," she insisted, and tugged Hermione away. There was a balcony, with the paint peeling, meant for tourists in better days.</p><p><em>Good enough. </em>Bellatrix, Tonks, Luna, Hermione, and Lady Tamar. The elder woman had procured tea for them in the Middle Eastern style, with a little rub of herbs and a bit of sweetener—who knew what it really was, but it did the job, the tea blazing hot in the heat of the midday sun, as thick as syrup.</p><p>"Do you think it will really be long?" Tonks had assumed her normal shape, for now, but was still wearing the right clothes, to be ready in a heartbeat; to conceal them, she had tossed a barnous over herself, acquired from one of the tens of thousands of Arab refugees packing Yerevan, in a quick bargain. "I've heard that the 25th Army Corps launched a significant counterattack."</p><p>"No," Bellatrix shrugged, staring at her niece for a moment, and then refilling her demitasse teacup. "He won't regard the muggle operations as relevant. He'll push forward with his plan, whether or not he's in position. He… Is very intelligent, but not in ways that keep him from being predictable."</p><p>She rubbed her forehead, idly, with her gold hand, and Hermione couldn't resist the urge to reach out and brush her cheek.</p><p>Tonks looked at them almost quizzically. After a moment, it made Hermione flush.</p><p>"How the hell, Auntie Bella, did the Brightest Witch of Her Age ever follow a total fuckin' tosser of an idiot like Tom Riddle? Really?"</p><p>"I'll probably die wondering that myself," Bellatrix answered with her usual brutal honesty, and Hermione held her tighter.</p><p>A MinKol officer stepped up and saluted. "Field Marshal," he patently ignored the embrace, "we have information that a large detachment of Morsmordre Aurors have been pulled back to Voldemort's headquarters in Muş. And, the last orders, in response to the offensive by the 25th Corps, were to bypass Tatvan, and attack to the northeast. Finally, a very strong magical signature was detected passing through the wards on the front, about fifteen minutes ago."</p><p>"Thank you, Councillor. You're dismissed," Bellatrix answered, her eyes glimmering. "One more round of tea for us, all?"</p><p>Nobody dissented. They poured full the little glasses. It wasn't wine, but it would do. "Confusion to the Enemy."</p><p>They drank the toast, with tea that nearly burned the throat. And this time, Hermione took the time, to kiss Bella goodbye.</p>
<hr/><p>Back to Koschei's Palace. Larissa reflected on how it was the place all of this madness had started, which in the end, had led her to stand alongside the man she now loved. All of it had been set in motion by this encounter, by this place, by the palace with the red lights which still dimly glowed, under the veil of shadow above.</p><p>There had been a certain nervous silence, almost religious, which prevailed as they walked up to the palace. Harry was as tense as a man could be. Larissa certainly thought she saw the qualities in him, the courage, the eagerness to please, the suppressed ambition that boiled forth in some topics, and his loyalty to friends and family who returned to him even the smallest kindness, which had made him Hermione's friend in another life, another time.</p><p>It was enormously unfair to both Hermione and Harry—to be separated for years, where one of them grew and made changes and compromises to survive, and the other was sheltered in the veil of death, for better or worse.</p><p>But now they stood before the Distiches on the great door to Koschei's audience hall, to his burial-place, a mocking reminder of the vagaries of fate. Larissa delicately danced her wand through the translation spell which transmuted them into their native tongues, so the others who had not been there, could appreciate them for the first time.</p><p>Chernosvyat.</p><p>"<em>When the Writing of Destiny is encountered </em></p><p>
  <em>All scheming and hope fail before Fate </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Allah has commanded the way to Anahit </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Fall silent before the blows of the Faithful </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Immortality is mine alone to claim forever </em>
</p><p>
  <em>For I, fair supplicant, grasped the prize </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Before the appointed hour of Fate </em>
</p><p>
  <em>When the road to immortality closed </em>
</p><p>
  <em>The difference between you and I is but </em>
</p><p>
  <em>The difference which Fate hath decreed </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thus, supplicant, know my favours kind </em>
</p><p>
  <em>and Know, too, that I hold no regret." </em>
</p><p>"Do you think it contains a clue?" Harry asked, looking up at the words.</p><p>Larissa had never thought of it like that before. She thought it was just an example of Persian poetry, reflecting on the vagaries of fate, that she herself had experienced.</p><p>"Well, start with the first line. If it's a clue as Lord Potter says-what is the Writing of Destiny?" Draco asked.</p><p>It was Ginny and Larissa, who had both been raised as Christians, who looked at each other. Ginny's eyes narrowed.</p><p>The two stepped forward together, with Ron on their heels, at Harry's side. Into the audience hall, before Koschei's throne, before Koschei's body. There, Larissa stood, and took a breath of the musty air, and pointed her wand toward the great empty wall to the south, which had on it only abstract blue frescoes and tesseracts, and flicked her wand through a sequence of unveiling. "<em>Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin</em>!"</p><p>"Oh Dear Lord," Ron muttered, momentarily astonished and a bit horrified that Larissa had just done that, said those words in a spell. <em>The Black Court of Koldovstoretz, indeed we are those who know no fear</em>, Larissa thought with the proud confidence of someone who forever would face risk bravely.</p><p>The wall glowed red with the infamous words from the Bible, the Supreme Proclaimation which foretold the end of Belshazzar's reign over Babylon.</p><p>Koschei rose from his grave, the holes in his skull, his eye-sockets, glowing blue, tattered and mummified flesh on his bones, the enchanted corpse of the Undying.</p><p>Harry gasped, and levelled his wand, with Ron and Ginny too.</p><p>But Larissa turned toward him, and bowed. "M'Lord."</p><p>An unearthly laugh echoed through Chernosvyat. It didn't precisely come from Koschei, but it was there. "Are you not some truly clever witch? How did you know?"</p><p>"You had the time to enchant yourself with your dying breath, to carry your own memories. It was clear, My Lord, that you have a wit, and why would you not acknowledge that your own Distiches had come back to claim you? The Hand had written out your Destiny, too. Fate is a Mistress who claims us all. It was as it was for Belshazzar; Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. You were a man who dared great things, and was found wanting by God. Why?"</p><p>"Is he… Alive?" Harry asked softly.</p><p>"No, it's just like a portrait," Ginny whispered.</p><p>"I dared the Lake of Anahit, before that damned eunuch closed the door."</p><p>"We understand that there is also a night road to Ararat, however," Larissa replied. "What do you know about that?"</p><p>"Hah! Hah! The night-road is the road to Azi Dahaka, you see. But Azi Dahaka will forever be held in check by the Lake of Anahit. In the most ancient times of the Golden Age of Mankind, the lake was made by the ancient Powers of this world, to hold Azi Dahak in check. One as a Goddess, fought at the side of the three worthy Persian heroes, this is the truth."</p><p>"Anahita herself walked in battle against the monster," Larissa murmured, her eyes narrowing. "You mean that someone cannot claim the Power of the Lord of Ten Thousand Serpents, because the lake exists?"</p><p>"Well – unless they destroy the lake first," the enchanted corpse laughed again. "But you cannot ascend the night road to the Lake to destroy it if you are the servant of Azi Dahaka. You must walk the Light Road. The temple and the priests will stop you… All the more, that bitch has put an eternal gate in the road."</p><p>"The Room of Requirement in the Temple. So you cannot use the gate between the Lake and the Door if you are a servant of the Serpent beyond the Door? The Darkness Between the Stars?"</p><p>"You cannot. I was seduced, and I failed. Such is fate. But I claimed my centuries despite it. What will you do, sojourner?"</p><p>"Live fearlessly, and die bravely," Larissa answered, "having lived and loved and laughed. They will not write the kind of poems about me that they write about you. But I will be more glad for it. You mean we do not need to spare or kill the one who serves Azi Dahaka, as long as the lake remains intact?"</p><p>He just laughed. "Let's see if fate will treat your effort kindly, witch."</p><p>Whatever else was not for this conversation, not for what Koschei had seen fit to leave behind.</p><p>"You claimed my riddle," the enchanted corpse then proclaimed, more like a recording track than a living thing. "What shall you have for it? Be careful what you ask for, witch."</p><p>"An answer to three questions only, My Lord."</p><p>"Ask a question, receive an answer!"</p><p>"Is your herd of cattle descended from Barmāyeh, My Lord?"</p><p>"Yes."</p><p>"What is the power that Barmāyeh had over Zahhak, that her milk prepared a Prince to defeat him?"</p><p>"None."</p><p>Larissa frowned. This was all very useful, but was it pointless? As long as we defend the lake from Voldemort, can we … The Ox-Headed Mace. Such as the most direct translation of Barmāyeh, Larissa remembered.</p><p>
  <em>Be careful how you ask your last question. Koschei left his simulcra to be careful. You wanted an answer about how to defeat Voldemort, if he has made himself the servant of Azi Dahaka. But he gave you an honest answer to the real meaning of the question. That is all you are owed under your agreement.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Guess. Dare. Be specific.</em>
</p><p>"If Barmāyeh nurtures weapons against Azi Dahaka, how is it done?"</p><p>"The cow drank the Water of Life."</p><p>Anahita's power. The Water. The Lake. A man takes in the warrior spirit of the goddess. "Truly, even in Death, you are Great, My Lord!" She offered in solicitation, and bowed again.</p><p>The eyes of the corpse went dark, and like strings were cut, it fell back to the divan, though without injury to the mortal remains.</p><p>Harry stepped closer. "What does that mean, Larissa?"</p><p>"You need to get to the lake, and drink the Water of Life. And the weapon which stops Voldemort must be – something that was forged or tempered in it. The cattle are only important because they drank Anahita's water. We may go, and we don't have much time. If he destroys the lake, he will unleash Azi Dahaka's power at his command, and enslave the world to his will. But to destroy the Lake, he must walk the night road, and then walk the day road. And Elahaïs stands in the Night Road, and it will be up to Hermione and Luna to figure her out. But I have to say, Lord Potter, thank you. I understand why Hermione is your friend," she grinned. "You rather economically asked just what we needed, when we needed it. Now let's go, and pray our friends are just as successful."</p><p>"We should milk the herd, just to be sure," Ginny offered.</p><p>Larissa frowned, but nodded once. They had the time, if barely, to cover their bases.</p>
<hr/><p>The Dead Room of Requirement. It still sent shivers down Hermione's spine, that she was literally inside the Earth when within it, that the Earth was around her and inside of her, and that she was only not entombed, no, fused with the Earth, solely because Elahaïs decided to permit her to live, inside of the cubical bounded box, which provided to Elahaïs whatever her ghostly heart and mind decided she wanted (going back through the conversations she had with Elahaïs, 'her' seemed best, for the moment at least).</p><p>It was like having a conversation with someone when they had a guillotine fixed into place above your head.</p><p>For all that, Elahaïs was very polite and very correct. She had been before, and this time, she was, again.</p><p>The feminine eunuch greeted them with a bow, and insisted they set, before a low table, where Elahaïs poured out tea for them into little cups, which satisfied them even though it was as dead as the room. Such had been Elahaïs' Requirement, and so it was done.</p><p>A smile, from a face that had learned to lie and prevaricate at a young age, as a matter of survival. Hermione knew to be careful, though Luna, who had previously been threatened at wand-point by this woman, smiled kindly to her as if that past had been nothing at all.</p><p>Elahaïs smiled so sweetly at the individuals who looked like Hermione, Luna… And Bellatrix. "Hermione. Luna. Lady Nymphadora Vulpecula Tonks-Remus-Black."</p><p>"<em>Oi, you fucker</em>!"</p><p>"I was invariably the one being fucked," Elahaïs answered drolly, with a pithy dapper wit.</p><p>Hermione couldn't help herself, and laughed.</p><p>"Enjoy your tea," Elahaïs raised a cup. "So, you return, and when the hour is late. Your erstwhile Dark Lord is walking the Night Road."</p><p>Tonks immediately froze at that. "So he's going in, now?"</p><p>"Oh yes."</p><p>Hermione put a hand on Tonks' shoulder. "We were expecting it. We were preparing for it."</p><p>"We should try to cut him off, pin him in place, though. If Auntie Bella and Lady Tamar succeed we can finish him then and there. We both know how the game is played. Sometimes when an opportunity presents itself, you have to take risks."</p><p>"There's no harm in him walking the Night Road by itself; he will just enslave himself, he will complete the deal. Oh, he will bring power to the world, but it is not the kind of power which cannot be easily defeated. Not like during the first war, when Zahhak ruled for a thousand years of darkness."</p><p>"Is there a threat?" Hermione finally asked.</p><p>"Do you want there to be one?" The eunuch shrugged idly, and poured out more tea for them all. "I was more worried about the temptation of Bellatrix Black, but she seems, fortunately, the kind of person who follows another to Hell, but won't start down the road herself."</p><p>"Bellatrix would never…"</p><p>"The promise of saving her daughter, of saving you, of saving the world? It's such a small price to pay. Azi Dahaka doesn't care about a world; he would surely destroy Earth, if he came in contact with it, but he is far away, and does not care. It's sapient beings who create doors, in their lust for power or pride or beauty—immortality, whatever have you. Azi Dahaka is a reasonable party, as the Cosmos goes. Give a measure of your soul to the Darkness Between the Stars, receive back a measure of its, his power. The price is only your own insatiable thirst for souls, but this can at least be quieted with a regular stream of sacrifices … I have had visions, my dear Hermione Granger, of the tens of thousands of worlds which groan under their reasonable trade, keeping Azi Dahaka sated in the times between his encounters with planets… On those tens of thousands of worlds, a man like Zahhak rules, and sacrifices some of the people, sacrifices their souls to Azi Dahaka… While life among the elite, the chosen, continues. A civilisation can still do wonderful things, when it is enslaved to Azi Dahaka. The ninety percent who are held as cattle, to develop immortal souls for His consumption, ahh… But there are the ten percent, the ruling elite, the soldiers, the nobles, the descendants of the family members… Bellatrix could have ruled as the Immortal Dread Empress of Earth for a hundred thousand years, and Delphini could have been gifted with a million descendants, all prosperous. For the small price of a measure of human sacrifices each year, from a muggle population managed to provide these. That is what Zahhak managed—a Thousand Year Reich far more horrifying than the one you are thinking of in your mind… And it's all for nothing." Elahaïs shrieked and laughed. "It's all for nothing. Probably, life on a planet will live and grow and die over billions of years, over countless of aeons, over many cycles of the Ages. It will never be extinguished by Azi Dahaka. But if, in his mad, random meanderings through the Darkness Between the Stars, he comes across a planet? Every living thing on it is instantly extinguished. He doesn't care whether or not you are his servant then. He's not capable of caring, or even thinking in those terms. Tens of thousands of worlds sacrifice souls to him, but their odds of the cosmic accident of a direct encounter are no better or worse than those of the worlds which, as our's did, resist the impulse and the temptation to grant him power. He simply meanders onwards, uncaring, through the Dark madness of the night. It's Man who seeks him out, in all our thousands of sapient expressions… We create these hells, for nothing." Elahaïs slapped the table. "But. It can seem like a very good idea at the time. With that power, Bellatrix would have been almost unstoppable."</p><p>"She would never. Azkaban left irons in her soul. She would never hand someone over to a Death equal to the Kiss of the Dementors."</p><p>"Dementors, ahh, now there's a story…" Elahaïs grinned, nastily. "Dementors are what's left your soul when Azi Dahaka or one of his bonded servants consumes it. All the Dementors presently on Earth, were once innocent young men, sacrificed to Zahhak."</p><p>Tonks made a retching noise of aghast horror.</p><p>A giggle, from the eunuch. "A soul, after all, is immortal, and how is it ooh, I find such neat things in your mind," the eunuch winked to Hermione, and broadly let it out that here, she could easily practice Legilimency on them, without making them aware of it, "so this is how it goes yes? 'That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die'. How strangely appropriate: Welcome to the life of a Dementor, if you can call it that."</p><p>Blanched in horror at the implications of that apocalyptic nightmare, Hermione felt sick to her stomach. "Does that mean, Amycus Carrow…" She barely forced herself to whisper, in a hoarse voice.</p><p>"Do you want me to lie to you?"</p><p>Luna reached out and hugged Hermione, gently, while looking intently at Elahaïs. "Don't be so mean to her. You'd have done the same thing in her place," she said, raptly looking at the eunuch.</p><p>"I would have. It had to be done," Elahaïs agreed without hesitation. Hermione felt her nausea abruptly lift.</p><p>"I don't want you to soil the carpet," Elahaïs remarked a hair snidely, and then continued. "The door would have otherwise stayed open until it found someone to receive its power. And without the Lake of Anahit above, it could have consumed the entire world, through a Door left open, with none to tend it."</p><p>"So, Voldemort… He has to face the Lake, first?"</p><p>"He does… He must destroy it, after he has pledged himself to Azi Dahaka. That is why I say there is no harm in what he is doing now. And when he tries to destroy the Lake, he must walk this road—Right. Through. Here. So I will face him, Rabdos to Rabdos, as finely as if I were still alive."</p><p>"But you can't defeat him, can you?" Luna asked, probingly.</p><p>"No. But, it's easy enough to obtain. A weapon fresh with the water of life may disable him. Open the door a little, and send him through to his new master. The door will remain closed until another is mad enough to begin to flirt with his power. But you cannot kill him; do that, and the door may yaw open."</p><p>"Then I'll dip my wand in the lake and hit him with a stunner right after," Tonks answered, her hair flickering to turn red despite still looking like Bellatrix.</p><p>"If you dip your wand in the lake right now, it will be useless by the time he comes. And I don't intend to be defeated. Just because I cannot finish him does not mean I cannot stop him."</p><p>"Is that why you didn't tell us?" Luna looked with blue eyes so sharp, under blonde hair that was so gentle, a lilting summer maiden, who saw and knew far more than any mortal should. "That you wished to be the Victrix, after all these years of suffering and waiting? Is there more?"</p><p>Elahaïs froze, and then glared at her. "The problem," the eunuch allowed, "is that the mountain is a volcano. The power of the Goddess has always kept it in check, but as her veneration in the world waned, the lava has surged closer to the surface. I have determined there is a risk…"</p><p>"He doesn't need to walk the Light Road. He could trigger the eruption by influencing geochemical processes, and destroy the Lake without defeating you. So you need our help."</p><p>"I do."</p><p>Hermione listened to Luna and Elahaïs talk, but she could only think of Amycus Carrow, vanishing in a flash of black light.</p><p>"...So, what happens if Voldemort still has a horcrux?" Tonks asked.</p><p>
  <em>Oh. Problem.</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>Lady Tamar, though her hair had gone grey, was otherwise quite hale and healthy for and eighty-five year old. She spent the trip lightly teasing Bellatrix about the fact the younger woman had immediately insisted that wouldn't see herself go grey until ninety, such as the strength of the Black family blood. The Dadiani, after all, had married muggle nobility, and the Black had not.</p><p>It was something of a bond, though Lady Tamar had gotten Bellatrix solidly, when she had, admittedly, committed the strategic mistake of bringing up the fact Tamar was older than her husband.</p><p>"I don't think you ever get to bring that up again," she had remarked in her accented English, and that had been that. It was true. Bellatrix, who didn't much like thinking of her age, oftentimes forgot just how much older than Hermione she was.</p><p>Bellatrix had carried on like a good sport. Tamar had her dead by rights.</p><p>They had disapparated near Muş, at the exact same moment that Hermione and her group should have disapparated near the pomegranate orchard, before the Temple. Departing from the same location in Van, if timed right, their signatures through the field-wards hastily established by the Morsmordre Aurors, should be at least somewhat confused.</p><p>Now they crept closer toward the headquarters that Voldemort had established in the city. Their banter had fallen away into silence, they were both experienced at this most deadly game, after all.</p><p>The city around them was deathly silent and very still, and they both imagined what had happened, but didn't see the need to bring it up. Only the sound of the artillery in the background on the front broke what would have otherwise been a deathly stillness. Even the Morsmordre soldiers on guard duty in the streets were quiet and nervous, and the reason for that was soon made very clear, as they approached the headquarters which had once been a university—Inferi were drawn up, standing silently, waiting orders from the Master who controlled them.</p><p>A few Morsmordre Aurors paced beyond them, also looking uncomfortable.</p><p>They found themselves hiding behind a concrete loading dock, eyeing the main building.</p><p>"This could hours to search for even a giant snake," Tamar remarked, at last, her eyes warily flicking to the group of Inferi. "Do you have another idea?"</p><p>"Yes," Bellatrix answered. "I speak Parsel—but not truly. Parsel is a magical language, and the last of the Heirs of Slytherin who could speak it truly are… Well, Voldemort, and my daughter. Say, my daughter is transformed into a snake, I can speak to her, because she's not a true snake, who can only be spoken to by someone of the magical blood lineage. Nagini is a Maledicta. Different than a simple transformation, if it wasn't, someone could just heal her, after all. She can sort of understand my Parsel, but hates it, like nails grating across a chalkboard. A true snake, born such, won't react at all. So how about I introduce myself, and we head to wherever there's a commotion."</p><p>"Those Inferi may be enchanted to attack anyone in the area; as soon as we create a commotion, they may set upon us."</p><p>"Then blow them up first. If we're going to make a commotion at all, a bigger commotion is best." Bellatrix winked and shrugged. As far as she was concerned it was true, anyway.</p><p>Tamar muttered something under her breath, like she were dealing with a particularly recalcitrant child, and fingered her wand. "You amplify your voice, and speak in Parsel. I'll deal with the Inferi."</p><p>"Gotcha." Bellatrix winked, and then, with her crooked wand held lightly at her side, leapt up onto the concrete of the loading dock, and began to speak in a croaking hiss of utterly unnatural sounds, as she silently cast the amplification spell on her speech.</p><p>...And was rewarded with the violent sound of a hiss and a thrashing snake sending a surprised Morsmordre Auror falling out of a window, defenestrated by the abrupt discomfited spasm of the massive Nagini.</p><p>Several of the other Aurors on patrol stared dumbly at the falling man, as he toppled down and snapped like a loosely stuffed doll against the side of an abandoned, rusted out and garbage filled rubbish bin.</p><p>Then they looked to Bellatrix. Behind them, the Inferi began to turn and move.</p><p>She waved.</p><p>Tamar leapt up, and hit the group of Inferi with an Incendiary Bombarda shot. The quadrangle of the campus literally exploded in flames.</p><p>An emergency siren began to howl over the distant roar of the cannonade.</p><p>Bellatrix, laughing, lunged up the side of the building for the broken window. <em>Game on.</em></p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin -- Daniel 5:25.</p><p>мене, мене, текел, фарес.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0096"><h2>96. There is Danger Ahead</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><b>There is Danger</b> <b>Ahead</b></p><p>Together, Voldemort and Dolohov had descended deeper into the mountain, their wands lighting the way. They had reached it without incident, though the fighting was very fierce all along the front, a matter hand to hand, knife to knife, with every weapon mustered at point-blank range. His troops were trying to fight their way through to join up with them even now, and cut the 25th Corps off after the impudent daring of their offensive.</p><p>And that entire world seemed to recede further and further into a distant memory, the closer to that horrifying Door they reached.</p><p>The damage to the halls was unrepaired. Impossibly ancient, the collapsed stone served as a reminder of the punishing battle with Bellatrix and Hermione that had been fought here. Dolohov swore he could remember the exact spot where that dark tendril of power had obliterated Amycus for all time.</p><p>The two paused, and Voldemort turned to face him, directly before the door. It made Dolohov uncomfortable. He had never stood this close to it before, and the last time it opened, anyone who had stood this close would have been obliterated by the spreading tendrils.</p><p><em> “</em>My Good Man, you will be remembered as the foremost of my servants, the finest of my Lieutenants. I will praise you, and your line will long prosper,” Voldemort declared, in a rare example from his reptilian lips, of extravagant flattery.</p><p><em> “</em>My Lord, what is your command?”</p><p>Voldemort produced an obsidian dagger, set in a hilt which glistered and glimmered with sigils, wrapped with leather made of human skin.</p><p>Dolohov stared, feeling very cold and, dare he admit it to himself, very nervous. “M’lord?”</p><p><em> “</em>Take it. Kneel.”</p><p>There was no negotiation or hesitation. Dolohov took the dagger, and knelt.</p><p>And then Voldemort knelt in front of him. He began to lay out, carefully, some ritual elements, which seemed made from human bone, and other things, more ancient and more magical. He traced, in an indecipherable sigil, some ooze upon the black stones. The rim of the door began to glow with a blue light.</p><p><em> “</em>When I tell you, stab me in the heart as firmly as you can, Dolohov.”</p><p>
  <em> “My Lord?” </em>
</p><p><em> “ </em> Obey! When I tell you, <em> stab me as firmly in the heart as you can,” </em> Voldemort’s eyes blazed with fury. “The door must not be allowed to open all the way. <em> It must not be allowed to open all the way. </em> Do you understand me? I will <em> not </em> have the power to close it when it begins to open. Only stabbing me through the heart with an obsidian blade will do it, and you <em> must </em> do it before the door opens fully, <em> do you understand me?” </em></p><p><em> You must act precisely and quickly to save the world from that nightmare, </em>Dolohov thought, with a cool chill all through his soul, as he readied the dagger. “I am ready, My Lord. I will do as I am commanded.”</p><p><em> “</em>Good.” Voldemort began the ceremony then, and as he did the blue glow spread through the caverns. With it, came a rumbling through the mountain, from an unknown source. It did not seem to emanate from the door. He was now chanting, in an unfathomable, incomprehensible tongue. And then he ripped the upper part of his robes off, and bared his chest.</p><p>The door’s frame glowed, but the door itself remained an impossible pitch black, a surface so smooth that it was like it didn’t exist, with no imperfections at all in it, which swallowed up the light.</p><p>And then it began to open. The crack revealed a star, millions of stars, billions. Dolohov, in a wordless horror, saw entire galaxies in the crack in the door. He saw the infinite vastness of sidereal space seem to stretch out over them as a tendril, the first, smallest tendril began to appear.</p><p>The door yawed wider, and the tendril shot out—toward his Lord and Master. <em> Oh Gods… </em></p><p>There were no Gods here. But unlike the luckless Amycus, Voldemort had no fear, and Dolohov had no cause to fear for him. The whisper of a smallest touch of the darkness came, but instead of vanishing Voldemort entirely, there was a gasp, almost erotic, from him. “<em> Close the door!” </em>He screamed.</p><p>Dolohov plunged the blade deep into Voldemort’s heart.</p><p>The tendril, which had been growing, which had been starting to merge with Voldemort’s body, which had been turning it into a black shadow, abruptly vanished. The door slammed closed, with a dull strange thud which seemed to reverberate through the entire Earth.</p><p>Dolohov drew in a ragged, desperate breath, and looked with horror to his Master and to what he had done.</p><p>But Voldemort just looked down, to where black ichor gently oozed from the wound in his chest, and laughed. “Very good, my good man. You struck cleaning, when you needed to.”</p><p>And then the Dark Lord toppled over, gasping, groaning, thrashing, writhing. From his shoulders, baby snakes thrust their way from the bare skin and began to grow, hissing and writhing.</p><p>His eyes turned solid black.</p><p><em> “</em>Pull the dagger… Pull it…” Voldemort commanded in soft, ragged gasps as he spasmed on the rock.</p><p>Dolohov lunged forward and extracted it from the snakes, which grew to full size from his Lord and Master’s shoulders.</p><p>Voldemort calmed, and ceased to be in pain, and after a few minutes of resting and breathing hard, extended his hand for the dagger, which Dolohov wordlessly returned to him.</p><p><em> “</em>Help me, my good man, for I am weak now… But must soon to be strong, to destroy the impertinent traitor.”</p><p><em> “</em>My Lord?”</p><p>Voldemort struck him. “You fool. Bellatrix. She has taken advantage of my weakness… She is going for Nagini, but I am in no condition to stop her. Help me to be ready. They are coming. This is not the end—it is only the beginning of the end. We must be ready to face them!”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>One window-ledge to the next, scrambling off of the lintels and featherweighting herself with a spell so she could throw herself up to the next level, then doing it again. Spells and bullets skittered off the rock and at each ledge she flung out a <em> Protego, </em>a quick, frantic shield, while nonverbal magic shot smoke around her to obscure herself.</p><p>It was like swimming uphill. She loved <em> every minute of it, </em> how couldn’t she? The window in front of her was the blasted open one, the place they were keeping Nagini, and she made her last lunge, taking the time to spin around behind her and catch someone running through the courtyard with a <em> Confrigo. Serves you right to expose yourself. </em>Triumphant, she continued the follow-through of her wand motion to spin toward the entrance, and throw herself into the already-shattered room.</p><p>Bellatrix’s wild, magically enhanced lunge up the wall of the building got her into the room all right—and face to face with a giant magical snake that she’d just irritated, and the two or three shocked Aurors who <em> hadn’t </em>been defenestrated and were trying to figure out what to do with the suddenly hostile Nagini.</p><p>Nagini, however, knew what to do with <em> her. </em>The massive snake immediately lunged, and began to coil around Bellatrix, leaving the elder witch with a strangled cry before her chest was sharply constricted.</p><p><em> “Oh, ugh, fuck!” </em>And then she could barely draw breath at all.</p><p>It did, however, force both of the enemy wizards to back down from their attacks. They understood that they were under absolutely clear instructions that if Nagini was harmed in the slightest, their lives would be forfeit.</p><p>So they had no way to attack her with Nagini wrapped around her body. <em> Convenient. I’ll just die by fucking snake! </em> Her eyes rolled and she saw ceiling panels. <em> Fucking muggle ceiling panels. </em> They looked like the cheapest, most awful and forlorn things, hanging in strips of cheap metal. <em> I spit on you, Riddle, your last command post has cheap muggle ceiling tiles. </em>Her eyes started to black out.</p><p>But Tamar was right behind her, having left a chaos of explosions and fire-causing spells behind her across the quadrangle. As the Georgian witch lunged through the smashed window, she snapped a <em>Bombarda </em>straight between the two Morsmordre Aurors, who couldn’t range on her with Nagini, still busily squeezing the life out of Bellatrix, in the way.</p><p>Bellatrix gasped for breath and tried to ask for help. Nagini was getting ready to lunge with her teeth.</p><p>Then a <em> Confrigo </em>set one of the bowled over wizards on fire.</p><p><em> Let her work, </em> Bellatrix thought, and forced herself to concentrate with all of her strength. Her magical golden arm, after all, was not being crushed, not being denied oxygen, and had the strength she <em> needed </em>in it.</p><p>She jabbed her metal thumb into Nagini’s throat, and pushed. The snake hissed, and screamed. As Nagini writhed, Bellatrix attempted an offhand Accio—summing her trapped wand from one hand to the other.</p><p>Gleaming gold held the bent wood.</p><p><em> “Stupefy</em>!”</p><p>The flash of green behind them mercifully came from Tamar’s direction, and signalled an end to that side of the fight, as Nagini relaxed around her. Shouts and pounding feet echoed from below. They would not have peace for long.</p><p><em> “</em>Bellatrix?” Tamar turned toward her, dusting off her trench coat with a dapper turn of her off-hand, and her expression relaxing when she saw the woman alive, with Nagini stupefied. “Ah, good.”</p><p>Bellatrix couldn’t resist a defiant smirk, gasping air urgently through her lungs and forcing the words out for sheer spite’s sake, at the universe, not Tamar, who she was starting to like.<em> “ </em>As long as she’s wrapped around me, it will be easy to get out of here.”</p><p><em> “</em>Well, I suppose you’re right.” Tamar reached out and took her arm.</p><p>Bellatrix didn’t have enough time to fully process that it was probably an awful idea to be dragged sidealong when you had just nearly had the life choked out of you by a giant snake, who was still constricting your breathing.</p><p>So she got sick <em> and </em>fainted as they disapparated and reappeared straightaway in Van.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Larissa was proud of the fact that Master Flyorov had taught her how to milk a cow. Though she had never explained to her parents that a muggleborn professor at Koldovstoretz had decided to help explain to her how animal husbandry could be used in Shamanry by having her spend a fortnight at a Kolkhoz in the fast-vanishing days of the Soviet power.</p><p>Larissa had never quite gotten used to the idea of being a farmgirl, though, and especially in this case she had had to use magic from the first to calm the cow, which was, here in Chernosvyat, essentially feral. And she had too much sympathy for the cow to want to make a regular practice of this anyway—she supposed that if she were a wild animal, she’d have tried to kill anyone who grabbed her tits.</p><p><em> That’s probably just how tired you are, </em>she objected silently to herself at the mildly absurd thought. There was still a significant uncertainty in how to actually take down Voldemort, as the servant of the monstrous power. From time to time, Larissa thought back, hard, to try and remember in Musasir if she had seen a Golden Mace.</p><p><em> Well, no matter, it will come together or it won’t. </em>She finished the milking and checked her chrono, worried about the time. They would still have to return to Yerevan, and then make their way from there to Van. And it would be critical to know what the others had learned as well and to put it together—all of which required time.</p><p>Then Ron spoke up. “I see a light, crossing the field. Someone’s coming.”</p><p>Larissa spun up and away from the cow, turned to face the light, a twitch in her muscles, her wand ready. Draco swung in at her side, giving her a tight smile.</p><p>The group faced a man, white of beard, in wizarding robes like those of Persian, blue with the stars set in them. But he was there, and immediately recognisable. Ginny gasped.</p><p>The expression froze on Ron’s face—one of horror and determination.</p><p>Harry stared in wonder, tinged with a rapidly growing sense of horror. “Dumbledore. Was this a dream? Am I still dead, but I was just dreaming before? I…”</p><p><em> “</em>Ah, Harry,” he shook his head and looked around the group, his expression somewhat blank, somewhat detached. “It would be best if we were all dreaming, in this terrible world. This is exactly what I was afraid of, so many years ago, when I faced Grindelwald,” he became, looking around them, at the tears, the expressions of shock.</p><p>Draco, stiffly frozen against his fiancee’s side, and Larissa, staring with cold composure, and her wand still firm in her hand.</p><p><em> “</em>The magical and muggle worlds have collided, and the death and destruction has been unimaginable. And it won’t stop here, Harry,” he continued, sadly. “The kind of future Narcissa Malfoy envisions is one where magic is put in the service of a vision very, very similar to Grindelwald’s. She proclaims her commitment for British democracy, but she will … Implement Gellert’s vision, just with her hands concealed on Parliamentary levers of power, rather than openly displayed at the head of a mass movement.”</p><p><em> “</em>What’s wrong with Grindelwald’s vision? It was advocacy for a revolutionary vanguard of wizards to create a better future for all of humanity,” Larissa finally spoke, and stepped into full view. “Many of my professors thought he had been led astray, but was by no means wrong. Technology and the wizarding world are coming to a collision, were, rather, before the war. The Statute can’t hold in the face of General Artificial Intelligence. What are you doing here, Supreme Mugwump? What are you getting at?”</p><p><em> “</em>How very much like a good Koldovstoretsy aristocrat you are,” Dumbledore chuckled. “Indoctrinated in the Black Arts <em> and </em> radical social theory, <em> and </em>still a pureblood through and through, right at the side of young Mister Malfoy. Harry, these people are not your friends. Come with me, and we can find a way to end this war, without making the situation worse.”</p><p>Harry was frozen in place, trembling. “<em> You’re dead,” </em>he finally said, quietly.</p><p><em> “</em>You were, too.”</p><p><em> “</em>The Law of the Water of Death is clear,” Harry mustered. “One at a time. How…?”</p><p><em> Oh, I think I know, and there’s nothing good about it. </em>Larissa’s cold blue eyes were unblinking and her wand held firm as she stepped up toward Harry’s side. “The Master of the Deathly Hallows is not the same as the Master of Death, Harry, Voldemort has all three and he serves the Darkness Between the Stars. He can use them in ways that no other living being can. Dumbledore is not truly alive and he is not truly here of his own free will.”</p><p>Harry froze in place, the expression on his face widening, from shock and a growing sense of cold hatred. Larissa could see it so clearly.</p><p><em> He is an animated puppet of the Dark Lord, </em>she thought to herself.</p><p><em> “</em>How do you know, Larissa?” Harry finally forced himself to ask.</p><p><em>“</em>She’s <em>a Dark witch herself, Harry</em>,” Dumbledore objected abruptly, as though he were trying to warn Harry of the Black Court being just as bad as Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Larissa forced the smirk down in response. The old man’s wand in his hand was not his own, but another, unrecognised one, and it was trembling, old muscles and old skin faintly twitching that held it. “She has given herself to the service of dark powers and old Gods, as many wizards of Russia do. She’s telling you things that are not there. You live. I live. Life is clearly possible after death.”</p><p><em> “Larissa?” </em>Harry repeated, not answering Dumbledore’s appeal, his face a frozen rictus of emotional agony.</p><p>Wands held at ready, in hands tense, with muscles twitching. Perpetual gloom casting down upon them. Uncertainty. Misunderstanding. Misbelieving. Disbelieving. Hair triggers, ready at the first onset.</p><p>Harry was no neophyte.</p><p>In the stillness of the windless vale of Chernosvyat, there was nothing to distract them, no rustling of grass or leaf to dampen the sound of breathing of tension people, nothing to speed up the agonising, excruciating speed of the seconds.</p><p>Well, she’d have to explain sooner or later, and it would be like a standoff when she did. She had no choice, she had to answer, and so, she raised her voice, pleasantly accented English, to carry against the still air, to break the stillness, to explain the truth. A subtle tap of her wand, after all, and she could just barely make it out, bit her lip, let some blood trip out, let the pain focus her mind… See the black thread tracing back through the gloom and darkness toward the entrance of Chernosvyat. But it made it no easier to say, and she knew it would be a war of seconds, the moment she spoke. It felt like a trance. “Dumbledore has a--”</p><p>Ginny had grown into a tough young woman who could have easily played rugby if she had been a muggle. Without the war, she would have been a first-class Quidditch star. She was brave, but now her entire life had been consumed by this war, since her first year at Hogwarts.</p><p>She wasn’t afraid of that, and Larissa opened her mouth to scream, to tell her not to, but the words couldn’t come out in time.</p><p>Ginny flung herself in front of the green bolt that leapt from Dumbledore’s wand, unmoving, without an incantation, and tore straight for Larissa Sergeivna Naryshkina before she could finish speaking. Her body was consumed with the green flame, and collapsed down the ground at Larissa<em>’</em>s feet, dead.</p><p>Dead.</p><p>Dead.</p><p>Larissa’s wand was already swinging up, the motion initiated the moment she had begun to speak, knowing it would be necessary, but too late, too late to save Ginny, too late to stop the nightmare. Her muscles were kicking in, corded and furious, the familiar lethal forms remembered. That woman had been one of her front comrades, through terrible adventures, for years. “<em>Avada Kedavra</em>!”</p><p>Green light tore from <em> her </em>wand, fuelled by terrible hate, a terrible hate as cool and steady as any bleak, bitter, black fury of the Iliad or the Oresteia.</p><p>Dumbledore dodged it, but he couldn’t dodge the intersecting bolt of green light that had leapt from Ron’s wand at the same time. He had been ready for the woman of the Black Court to resort to such a measure.</p><p>He had not been ready for Ginny.</p><p>He had not been ready for the Ron who had become Strelkov.</p><p>And he toppled down dead while Ron’s face was locked in a rictus of agonised emotion, and a frozen look crossed the gap between Harry and Ron. A terrible silence reigned in the darkness of Chernosvyat.</p><p>It was done. The emotions surged up, and overcame the young Russian witch.</p><p>Larissa dropped to her knees, muttering, she couldn’t do more. <em>“</em>she saved me, she saved me,” she muttered again and again, almost in a trance, and quietly moved to Ginny’s eyes, to close them, before staring at the body of Dumbledore. “There was a Black Thread leading out of Chernosvyat, a black thread leading to him, if only you’d seen the Black Thread, if only you’d seen the Black Thread...”</p><p>The tears were falling freely from Harry’s eyes now. Ron, Larissa could see from her own place kneeling at Ginny’s side, was too cold to cry about it.</p><p><em> “</em>He desecrated Dumbledore’s body, to divide us and defeat us,” it was Draco who finally spoke, in a coolly measured and gentle voice, stepping up to her and putting his hands on her shoulders. He had grown so much! Even just since Larissa had known him—she was so proud!</p><p><em> “</em>He desecrated his body, and … Why would anyone check the tombs, whose first assumption is that your enemy will raise the dead, restore them, make them whole, animate them with his own dark power, just to divide and destroy you?”</p><p><em>“</em>Well.” Larissa slowly rose to her feet with his help. <em>“</em>Harry, I promise you, hold yourself together, because today, we’re going to kill Voldemort.” She gently shook loose from Draco and stepped up to Harry, and gave him a hug, ignoring the violent way he squeezed at her, desperately, shaken loose from his shock, a terrible fury crossing his face. Then, she shook loose from the young Englishman, and looked to Ron next.</p><p><em> “</em>We have to let her rest here,” Larissa murmured, walking up to Ron’s side. “Finish the battle first. The place she rests will forever be England, and we will bring her back, too. Promise.”</p><p>At last Ron found words, still looking at the body of his kid sister. “If it gets Voldemort dead, I’ll endure anything, now.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>As they talked about Horcruxes, Hermione was starting to realising that there might be another problem with the situation. The obvious answer that Elahaïs had provided was an unwelcome one—there would be no stopping Azi Dahaka if Voldemort still had a Horcrux. They simply <em> had </em>to deal with Nagini, one way or another.</p><p>But in another way… “Okay,” Hermione was saying, her mind racing from the tea, which Elahaïs constantly refilled for her, and urgently thinking about the battles that her other friends would be facing at that exact same moment. Dimly, she had an uncomfortable, disconcerting worry for Ginny, and passed by it, moving quickly on, unwilling to dwell upon it. “So, The Door closes when it has a link to this world which is controlled—which is given a finite end-point. When a Dedicant to Azi Dahaka gives themselves over, but then stops before their entire soul is consumed, by the sacrifice of their life. They then remain alive with Azi Dahaka’s power, yes?”</p><p><em> “</em>They do,” Elahaïs looked at her with hooded eyes. “What are you getting at?”</p><p><em> “</em>What’s the control mechanism for the gate when we send Voldemort through it? How do we actually make it close?”</p><p><em>“</em>A sacrifice gives you an impulsive moment of satiation for Azi Dahaka which allows the gate to be closed,” Elahaïs replied. “So, you send him through, and it’s done.”</p><p><em> “</em>But he’s <em> not alive anymore, not really,” </em>Tonks interjected. “Is he still a sacrifice?”</p><p>Elahaïs paused. “I don’t know.”</p><p>Hermione closed her eyes, and cursed softly. “it’s not recorded, how they closed the gate when they sent Zahhak through it, is it?”</p><p><em> “</em>It’s not. My understanding is that it is sufficient; however, if someone sacrificed themselves during that battle… I would not know.”</p><p><em> “</em>Who would do that? It would mean the end of their soul?” Tonks’ eyes glinted.</p><p><em> “</em>Hmmm. Well. Voldemort hasn’t given <em> all </em>of himself to Azi Dahaka. He still has his horcrux,” Luna offered. “Nagini, I mean. Perhaps it was …”</p><p><em> “</em>How could we sacrifice the rest of Voldemort’s soul to Azi Dahaka without sacrificing Nagini herself?” Hermione interjected.</p><p>Luna didn’t seem perturbed by the interruption. She gratefully accepted more tea from Elahaïs, looking thoughtful. “Snakes,” she said at last, “shed their skin. If Nagini is a woman, the horcrux is a snake.”</p><p><em> That was it. </em>Hermione leapt to her feet, in excitement, she just couldn’t resist. “Thank you, Luna! Elahaïs, do you know how the Water of Life will … Wait. We could just cut off Nagini’s tail before we apply it. Humans don’t have tails. Snakes can survive the loss of a tail, even if they can’t regrow them like a lizard. It’s not an essential part of who she is as a person. But it’s an essential part of who she is as a snake. The horcrux might remain with that, and that we can force.”</p><p><em> “</em>I know you are enthusiastic to find a way out of this,” Elahaïs murmured. “But it may be that the sacrifice is necessary. I am not sure that rampant speculation at this point will help. The Horcrux may not be tainted by Azi Dahaka, but it is still an essential part of Voldemort.”</p><p>Hermione sighed, and cursed softly. “You’re right. It’s all unfounded speculation. But… But… There has to be more information out there. I mean, how did <em> Voldemort </em>find out about all of this?”</p><p><em> “</em>Perhaps that’s why Nagini is important,” Luna looked up to her. “She might know <em> That.” </em></p><p><em> “</em>She would have been there when he researched it,” Tonks agreed.</p><p><em> “</em>It’s a bet we’ll have to stake our lives on,” Hermione finally acknowledged. “Well, then. Elahaïs, with your leave, we need to get to the caldera, and recover as much of the Water of Life as possible for this fight, and for healing Nagini.”</p><p><em> “</em>Be my guest,” Elahaïs laughed softly. “I control the access. I have allowed MinKol to get the top, and the VDV, and you before.”</p><p><em> “</em>Then why,” Tonks asked as they rose to go, “couldn’t you stop Voldemort?”</p><p><em> “</em>Again, the Dark Road—that, that I cannot control. But I will let none of the enemy through the Light Road for as long as I exist— <em> they must come before me, </em>and I am the guard in the mouth of Hell.”</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0097"><h2>97. When Time Stands Still (At the Iron Hill).</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>Bellatrix looked back out over the lake from the hotel on the shore in Van. A terrible storm had begun to buffet her. Lady Tamar had already confirmed from the met station that it had no discernable source, and was focused below the base of Damawand, of Ararat. The stupefied Nagini lay sprawled out in all her mass behind her, on the lakeshore porch of the hotel. Ahead of her, the flashes of gunfire were silhouetted against the black clouds and whipping wind of the storm. It was starting to rain, hot and acrid rain.</p><p>This was no natural storm. She could feel that in her bones, feel it in her magical core. Riddle had returned from The Door. He had made his pact. There were soldiers fighting over there, and sailors on the gunboats in the lake. They would be in the heart of the storm now.</p><p>And Riddle had already gained the power to deal mass death, solely through the magic lent to him. <em>He’s going to destroy them all.</em></p><p>For some unconscionable reason, Harry and Larissa’s group was late, and so was Hermione’s. Hermione would be dangerously close to the mountain, or even on it, and in that moment, she was struck with fear, turning back to Tamar. “You know, he could leap over and retrieve Nagini from us. We don’t have the Water of Life yet. Neither of the other two teams has yet returned to us.”</p><p>“He could,” Tamar acknowledged. “What are you thinking of, Bellatrix?”</p><p>“I must go and hold him at the mountain, until the others have returned, with the water and whatever else they have learned, and can destroy the Horcrux inside of Nagini. They can come up to us as reinforcements, and join us in the battle, as soon as that work is done,” Bellatrix answered, almost distracted, looking to the distant swirling vortex of the storm, growing and building in power. “If I do not, then he will come against us. I can feel his newfound power probing the wards around Van already. Stay here, tell the others, guard Nagini. I’m going to go forth, and hold him off.”</p><p>Tamar stared at her for a moment, looked at the storm.</p><p><em>What the devil is she thinking? </em> Bellatrix wondered. <em>We don’t have much time.</em></p><p>Tamar called over to the group of MinKol officers who had mustered near the hotel, and then pointed imperiously to Nagini. “That snake must be kept insensate until Councillor Granger and Councillor Naryshkina return. Against any enemy attempt to seize that snake, the entire city, if necessary, must sacrifice themselves; the entire garrison down to the last man. Is that understood—Councillor Takarian?”</p><p>The Senior Councillor in command, from the Armenian ministry, to his credit asked no question—the orders were brutally clear—nor made any complaint. He came to attention, and saluted. “God go with you.”</p><p>Tamar turned back to Bellatrix. “If there’s anything else they will need from us, Nagini in human form will provide it, either willingly or by the Imperious or Legilimency. Come on, Bellatrix, we’re going together.”</p><p>“Well.” She shook her head. “You know..”</p><p>“I know perfectly well what our chances are, Bellatrix. Now, before we run out of time…”</p><p>“Just one thing.” Bellatrix turned back to Councillor Takarian, before he could walk away.</p><p>“Have you got anything for us, Councillor?”</p><p>The man grinned, rubbed at his moustache, and turned back, producing a flask. “Oghi,” he offfered.</p><p>“Thank you.” Bellatrix took the flask, and held it between herself and Tamar. “No surrender, and no retreat,” she offered, and the two women drank one swig each, in their turn.</p><p>It was a moment for thinking. A moment for acknowledging that after all these decades, after her slavish service to him, after the child, the imprisonment, after the disillusionment—the war over the entire world—the romance, the ‘strategic turn’, it finally came to this. In the flesh, wand to wand.</p><p>Many times, Bellatrix and Riddle had duelled, to improve their skills. She was his finest Lieutenant. They had matched each other time and time again, and she knew very well that she could not match his power. She would try today, anyway, on this last, dread day of death, when the world hung in the balance. It was time to see if all those years and decades had given the smallest edge, the slightest insight into his tactics and ability. And to see if her own skills, the electric magic, the things she had long suppressed, would make it possible for her to surprise him with her skill and talent, and overcome him in this battle.</p><p>But that was all the time they had for thinking, and he, too, had gained some new power in this moment, and like as not, she was signing her own death warrant. She would never see Delphini again… But if it all worked out, Hermione would be there to raise her. <em>So be it. They’ll forget your whole career of evil, if you hold him off today. </em></p><p>It was time. Bellatrix handed the flask back to the Armenian Councillor, and faced forward again across the lake. “Let’s go!” Hand firm on her wand, settled into a stance from which she was ready to fight in a heartbeat, and with Lady Tamar firm at her right side, Bellatrix disapparated.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>With a snap, she appeared in the pomegranate orchard, before the ruins of the temple. The Earth rumbled, the artillery thundering toward them from the lines of the Morsmordre, while their troops rushed forward, locked in close combat with the 25<sup>th</sup> Corps.</p><p>Tamar appeared at her side. They could both clearly see him there at the very centre of the storm. The ground shook again, and Bellatrix changed her assessment, it wasn’t artillery, it was some other artifice. It originated alongside the storm at Voldemort’s position, where the Rabdos of Koschei was grounded to the earth.</p><p>Dolohov was the only Death Eater with him, and he turned abruptly, pointed, called. “The bitch is here, M’lord, with a friend.”</p><p>“Antonin we used to be friends. Do you really think this is sane? He will consume you just like the whole world, he has made a deal with a power greater than even he can control.” It was not quite true, but it was all she could think of saying.</p><p>“Hold her off, my good man,” Voldemort instructed, turning around. Tamar sucked in her breath, but Bellatrix just grimaced in disgust, at the writhing, living snakes that had emerged from his shoulders.</p><p>“M’lord, she has the Actual State Councillor for Georgia with her—Lady Tamar Dadiani. She is a legendary witch in Eurasia. It will be a real trial for me.”</p><p>Bellatrix did not let the discussion continue. She ended it with a <em>Confrigo </em>aimed at Riddle. Dolohov met it with a <em>Bombarda </em>right back at her, which for a moment surprised her—she was expecting him to shield Riddle—but she met it with a <em>Protego </em>and Tamar returned one of her own, freeing Bellatrix to spin back and attack Voldemort again.</p><p>The two women quickly pressed the attack, with an assertive battle-tempo, exchanging shields to cover each other and attacks, focused on Voldemort. At last, with a look of irritation, he brought forth a shield of tesseracting black and red geometric shapes, which stayed in place around him, resisting their attacks. At the same time, the winds, whipping at them, grew so fierce as to tear up chunks of rock and gravel from the ground and blow dust in their faces, forcing them to tune their <em>Protego </em>casting to protect themselves from a bone-stripping sandstorm just as much as from Dolohov’s assault. After an initial few minutes, they were pushed back on the defensive.</p><p>Only for a moment.</p><p>A third figure joined the battle, dressed in fine Persian court robes, up on the top of the hill, where the Temple once stood—over the spot of the dead Room of Requirement of the Temple. Rabdos firmly held in hand, and long dark hair whipping in the wind, the tall, lean figure in Parthian boots had a sword buckled to one hip, and laughed with a shrieking delight so intense over the wind that even Riddle looked up.</p><p>“Tom Riddle, my pleasure to introduce myself, I am Elahaïs, the last guardian of Ararat. You have invited yourself to a wizard’s duel, and so I will repay the favour: Here is how we fought, in ancient days.”</p><p>Speaking words of power in Old Parsi, Elahaïs cracked the ground under Voldemort’s feet with a flick of her <em>Rabdos, </em>and then conjured forth spinning glyphs of glowing ancient runes in the air, into which Dolohov’s <em>Confrigo </em>counterattack dissipated with a sharp snap of magic hissing in the air.</p><p>“Don’t bother with those curses, Dolohov!” Voldemort snapped, at last turning away from his work, and casually blocking a <em>Sectumsempra </em>from Bellatrix as he did, his own <em>Rabdos </em>now raised for battle. “The Eunuch is <em>dead. </em>The power is in the <em>ground</em>!” He turned toward Elahaïs and drove as <em>Rabdos </em>to the ground, crying out incomprehensible ancient words of power, creating a thundering furrow of red energy which tore deep into the bedrock, and split the Earth, tearing toward Elahaïs with the speed of lightning.</p><p>Elahaïs, laughing, snapped about in response, <em>Rabdos </em>striking the ground and carving a glowing line of blue power across the dirt, glowing, searing to glass. When the red furrow slammed into it, there was a hideous explosion of sparks and shaking of the ground, but Elahaïs and whatever gave her the power to fight on after death remained.</p><p>Bellatrix unleashed a barrage of hexes against Voldemort at the same time, just for him to block them with a lazy wave of the <em>Rabdos, </em> spinning back to face Bella and Tamar and laughing. “The eunuch has evened the odds some, but the matter is not in doubt, my dear ladies.” His <em>Rabdos </em>flying, he unleashed waves of power that bent and shook the ground, made it swell and roll like the sea underneath their feet.</p><p>Tamar spun her wand in a circle, countered the magic, evened out the ground under the like a boat on a pond, whilst Bellatrix blasted fire straight back at her former master.</p><p>Despite his lack of attention to it, the storm had not stopped, and if anything, it seemed more intense, as if he were maintaining it by thought, by wandless magic alone, at this point. <em>Not really a good sign. </em></p><p>“Bella, Bella, you idiot, you traitor. You should have never bet against your Master,” Voldemort laughed, and from that moment of stasis, whispered words in his voice, that seemed like the sliding of tentacles across the void of space. The sky grew even darker, and Bellatrix felt a strange tugging at her very <em>soul. </em></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>When Hermione and Tonks and Luna returned to Van with the Water of Life they had collected from the caldera lake, in military packs, she immediately had a terrible sense that the situation had worsened dramatically. Hidden inside the caldera, it had been impossible to see anything except the ominous sky overhead.</p><p>Now, with a flick of her wand to use a magnification charm, she could see the swirling black clouds of the horribly intense storm, with Lake Van churned to an unimaginable level by the power tearing across it. The storm seemed as intense as that they had faced on the day they had destroyed Azkaban, on the North Sea, but the auxiliary cruisers and gunboats still tried to hold position despite it. Their fire, both from their guns and the wizards on the deck, had become intermittent, and the booms of the shells impacting against the hills to the west of Ararat were muffled by the storm. The conditions for the men, manning open mount guns modified from Army pieces on the deck, must be awful, yet they still fired as fast as they could.</p><p>“Hermione! Nagini is already here!” Tonks was calling from the porch.</p><p>Hermione tore herself away from the sight along the lake, just to see that Tonks was right—she was standing with Luna on the porch, and there were MinKol officers milling around, and the massive form of Nagini, stunned and stupefied in coils of green. And no Lady Tamar. <em>No Bellatrix.</em></p><p>No Bellatrix. Fuck.</p><p>“Come on, Hermione, we need to apply the Water of Life to Nagini!”</p><p>Hermione ignored Tonks, and turned back to look at the heart of the storm, and the evidence, the flashes of light and energy, the disturbances humming through the air, which spoke of a terrible magical battle on the spot. <em>Gods. Great Gods above. </em></p><p>In that moment, all that she could think about was Fingolfin, having ridden out to face Morgoth.</p><p>I wait thee here. Come! Show thy face!'</p><p>Hermione shuddered in horror. <em>I have to be there. I have to be there. </em>She imagined Bellatrix, and raised her wand.</p><p>Then she was interrupted, by Tonks shaking her. “Come on, Hermione, don’t be a fool! Lady Tamar is with her, and she is one of the finest Witches of Eurasia. Come on, Hermione, didn’t Elahaïs promise to you in such pride that she even wanted to fight Voldemort alone, to humble him, I mean <em>come on! </em> Crazy Auntie Bella is <em>not alone. </em>We’ve got to use this time and use it smart! We’ve got to get Nagini back and be ready to go in there and fight to win! Come on!” Rain lashed at them, from the growing storm.</p><p>Hermione shook herself convulsively in her friend’s hands, and nodded. Hand in hand, they ran back to the porch of the Hotel. Luna was already preparing measures of the Water of Life. She settled in alongside of her friends, forcing herself to ape a calm that she did not really feel, that did not really reach her heart.</p><p>Tonks prepared a curse-breaking spell, as Hermione lowered the Water of Life carefully, with a funnel, into Nagini’s insensate mouth. Luna covered them.</p><p>For a moment, nothing happened. Then, as the water descended into the snake’s belly, Hermione could <em>feel </em>the curse emerge for her magic, and directed her power against it through the spell. The curse of the Maledicta, utterly unbreakable; but a healing magic of impossible power was directed against it.</p><p>It shattered so quickly that Hermione doubted her spell had any part in the working.</p><p>The body of the snake seemed to melt and shift away, shimmering like water, rolling and oozing like liquid glass ready to be blown. Hermione was thankful she had not let her speculation get the better of her; the snake’s whole body became that of the woman. But Avicenna’s wisdom, from centuries prior, held; just like Bellatrix had predicted. It was the essence of snake-ness that had been imbued with the nature of a horcrux. Ichor dripped forth, as if out of nothing, as the snake rolled and melted and disappeared…</p><p>...And the naked form of an attractive woman of Malay or Javanese extraction was left behind, sprawled across Hermione’s lap. There was a snap, a crack of electricity in the air.</p><p>A booming roar echoed from the heart of the storm across the lake.</p><p>“He felt that,” Tonks muttered in satisfaction.</p><p>Nagini blinked and looked up. Hermione had a brief inane thought about the entire thing.</p><p>
  <em>Help. I’m turning into Bellatrix.</em>
</p><p>She smiled down. “It worked.”</p><p>“The Water of Life,” the woman’s dry, hoarse whisper cracked, confused, desperate, needy, and alight with wonder.</p><p>And then the others returned.</p><p>Without Ginny.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>This was the worst of the War. Gas choked the flank of Nemrut Dagi. In any normal storm, with any normal, muggle gas, this should have been flung away by the winds. But unnatural, almost demonic, this thick green-black ooze hung low to the ground, and simply swirled and remained in choking clouds. It was both corrosive and flammable, and the only protection was to remain fully suited. They had spent more than a day with only water in their canteens to drink, and it was running thin.</p><p>Alexandra lay low around the decimated remains of her command staff. The enemy wizards and troops were pushing up, surging along the slope of the mountain, covered by a hail of artillery fire. The shells were continuously exploding around them, a storm of steel that whipped through the screaming winds, shrapnel wounds often spelling death from gas exposure, ricking up a continuous sleet of broken rock from the scree and shale of the mountain’s exposed flanks.</p><p>Their slit trenches barely provided any protection for them at all. Spells swept up the flanks from the advancing Morsmordre wizards, blasting craters into the flank of the mountain, rock tearing up toward them and falling back down, crushing and burying some of the defenders. The enemy surged on, braving their own attack gas under orders that terrified them too much to hesitate.</p><p>Alexandra lay lower in the rude shelter of the trench, and fingered the Dragunov she held, picked up off of a dead body of one of her own soldiers. <em>We can’t stay here any longer, </em>she thought, exhausted, thirsty, desperate, the continuous pounding of the shells hammering their nerves into a senseless state of agony from the endless interlocking roar of the cannonade. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had slept, now, alive in a soiled NBC suit for how long they’d been forced to wear them without respite, against the hideous magic gas.</p><p>And the storm was bearing down against them, more horrible and more awful all the time, while the Morsmordre troops clawed their way up around the north flank of Nemrut Dagi, trying to reach the shore of Lake Van, to cut them off in revenge for their own counteroffensive, to support whatever mad scheme of the Dark Lord’s had brought them all to fight at this terrible place.</p><p><em>But if we can’t stay, where can we go? </em> To go down to the crater lake inside of Nemrut Dagi, a reproduction in miniature of Ararat with a shattered side facing the greater mountain to the North, was madness—when the Morsmordre gained the ridge, they’d rip the Russian troops along the lake to pieces with mortar fire. Her unit decimated, her body raw aching, orders unclear through the jamming and chaos, they had simply held, and held, and held. As long as they held Nemrut Dagi, the enemy couldn’t bring artillery up the slopes to hammer the rest of the Corps in Tatvan. They <em>had </em> to hold. But the enemy wanted them <em>gone, </em> so they could push through to the north and reach Lake Van. The death or survival of the 25 <sup> th </sup> Army Corps and the 16 <sup> th </sup> Mongolian Infantry Division was incidental to the Morsmordre push, but to Alexandra and her comrades, it was their lives, struggling to the bitter end. And the merciless gas had them pinned. She received requests for reinforcement, for more ammunition, for instructions from men clearly desperate to fall back, and she tried to manage them, occasionally popping up as she did now to try to get a look down the crater-pocked flank of the slope. The fury of the cannonade drove her quickly back each time, and from those glimpses, she tried to direct a battle where she was now in command of the better part of a brigade, mixed together from the survivors of five units.</p><p>At the crest of the ridge behind her, on the rim of the crater, a radio aerial mast had been appropriated for use as a flagpole. The flag of the Russian Federation was still flying there, the end was shredded by the whipping wind of the storm and hung in rags, and there were holes through it from shrapnel and rocks kicked up by the artillery, but the flag still flew.</p><p><em>As long as your men can glance up and see the flag flying, they won’t break, </em> the thought ran through her head again. Perhaps it was the only thing keeping them there. By this point, from the notes on the half-folded, half-torn map, flecked with dust and rock, which served as her sole reference for commanding the ragged bands that formed her unit, she could not see how else they held. <em>You have not taken us! </em>Fifty thousand soldiers could look up from Tatvan and the southern flanks, the hills around Orenlik, and see that the Nemrut Dagi had not yet fallen to the enemy.</p><p>If there were even fifty thousand of them left.</p><p>
  <em>What can we do? We hold on until our last dying breath, that’s what.</em>
</p><p>If she was, by some luckless trick of fate, the last one left, she resolved to take the flag and leap down the cliffs of the caldera with it, to deny it to the enemy. It was a thought that came from nowhere, that suddenly seized her with the savage impulse of a lunatic’s despair, a fanatical determination that nobody would ever have a claim to shame them for this stand, that nobody could ever say they were beaten—destroyed, but never beaten.</p><p>And then Zoë the Palmyran leapt down into the trench with her, her robes flowing, flicking out behind her, ignoring a spatter of rock from a nearby shell-burst as she landed, blood licking at her cheek. She had no protective gear; she relied on a bubble-charm to keep herself safe from the gas, and Alexandra felt a moment of envy. The uncounted hours in full gear had been agonising.</p><p>The woman raised a canteen to her lips, but before drinking, slipped a vial into it, and sloshed it around. Then she drank from it—and offered it to Alexandra.</p><p>
  <em>My God, but I can’t take my mask off.</em>
</p><p>But, suddenly, the wind changed direction, and the gusts became so hard, or the wizard controlling the magical gas was distracted, and an open spot appeared and spread down the ridge. Trembling, Alexandra seized the chance; she ripped her mask off, grabbed the canteen, and unquestionably slammed down what was inside of it.</p><p>In a moment, she felt an impulse of manic glee. “Zoë,” she exclaimed, “what the fuck is this?”</p><p>“Liquid luck,” Zoë answered. “They’ve reached the shore, they’re distracted by victory, and it’s our last chance to hold the mountain. We can’t stay, we can’t run. But liquid luck? I brewed a vial before this battle, I thought it would be the last. I kept it for the moment we’d need it. And you’re the commander. Your luck is your unit’s luck. So you drink it with me.” She grinned. “We can’t stay, we can’t run.”</p><p>Alexandra was laughing. It felt like mania. The gas was still away from the mountain, though perhaps it was only from how close the enemy was, that whomever it was controlling it was finally acknowledging the risk to their own troops. But regardless, it was an opening. And Zoë was right. They couldn’t stay, they couldn’t run.</p><p>“Amplify my voice, make sure everyone in the entire unit can hear it,” she instructed urgently.</p><p>A wave of a wand. “<em>Done.</em>”</p><p>“Soldiers! Heroes! We have been torn apart by the enemy artillery, we have been choked in their gas, oppressed by their spells, brought to close quarters with their picked murderers! Still we are undaunted, and hold our ordered positions! The enemy has worked past us, they have taken the lakefront. We are cut off. They know their triumph—but we are <em>not dead, so we are not defeated</em>! The moment is now—the only way for us to hold is to go over onto the attack! The entire Corps did it days ago, now we will do it as a regiment! Damn their power and damn their Dark Lord, I hold them in contempt. Come on, Lads, we’re Russians!”</p><p>And in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, in the aftermath of a nuclear war, where technology and magic dominated the battlefield, where wizards and artillery could kill by the thousands, in those ragged lines of gas-choked and exhausted soldiers fighting along the rim of a high mountain, staring down at crater-scabbed slopes stretching before them and groups, knots and bands of Morsmordre troops continuing to struggle up-hill through the flickering tracers of their defending machine-gun – then, then, in June of 2004, six years after the war began, these soldiers, a mishmash of five units, wizard and muggle fighting side by side—the muggle troops, hearing their commander’s voice, began, all without orders and quite impulsively, to reach down and grab something at their sides.</p><p>Draw it.</p><p>Fix it to the barrels of their rifles.</p><p>The hot acrid rain lashed at her face, and felt good despite its ill portents. Zoë held out another canteen—Alexandra drank from it, tasted that it was Iranian style Chai, and felt like she had been given the ambrosia of the Gods. She handed it back with a laugh, and content, pulled her gas mask back on and secured it. “<em>Charge!” </em></p><p>She flung herself over the lip of the trench, covered by the Arab witch. Exposed to the fire, she quickly levelled the Dragunov, and snapped off a shot toward one of the Morsmordre wizards who, turned to the side, trying to deal with some other feeling or sense, had exposed himself and didn’t see the abrupt single round loosed from a position empty a moment before.</p><p>He fell as she watched his head blossom and explode in a streak of red from the shot. In the wizard protection battalions, their snipers used dum-dum rounds, to make sure of the job.</p><p>She waved her arm in a universal gesture and called out again. “Forward! Forward!”</p><p>It was no great massed charge down the slope. The machine-guns and mortars continued to fire, covering them. Alexandra and Zoë led the way, dashing down toward the next crater, and then the next. Running as hard as they could, flinging themselves into cover, rolling up, firing at opportune targets, and then charging again. But in groups and knots of dozens or a few hundreds, in disciplined leap-frog tactics, with their bayonets gleaming as a lethal promise at close range, with grenades dangling at the ready to be ripped from bandoliers and hurled in the lethal knife-fights that quickly developed in the occupied craters, they swept down hill with momentum and desperate courage behind them, and did not let the enemy reach them, but took the fight to the Janissaries, hugged them, attacked them point blank, with knife and grenade and bayonet, and forced them to pit their superior numbers as paid mercenaries against the fanatic courage of a band of soldiers who faced their fate as free soldiers, dying on their feet, dying on the offensive, for the freedom of their Motherland.</p><p>Alexandra rolled up from another crater, took down an enemy officer with another shot. “Forward! Forward!”</p><p>And as long as the luck would hold—they attacked.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>He had pushed down onto their very souls, trying to suck them out of their bodies. For a moment of horrifying, disconcerting nightmare, Bellatrix thought he might well succeed, and they would disappear like a flash into the nightmare of the God of the Dementors.</p><p>Then she had remembered her own magical innovation. Electricity hung in the air, the wonder of waves and currents, very well charged by the storm. She could feel it around her, making her hair stand up on end through the storm.</p><p>Snapping her wand through a complicated set of oscillating motions as she spun like a whirling dervish, chanting out variations on the name of the Goddess Elektra, she alternately snapped a Protego to defend herself from physical attack, and weaving in to the defensive working, she snapped into the electricity in the air, and extended outwards, and grounded her soul, and caught and tightened fast magical bindings, tamping Tamar’s soul down like to electric cleats in the sky, until it held steady against her body.</p><p>Elahaïs cackled. “Lightning witch! You’re fighting a lightning witch, Riddle! As it was said in ancient days!” The eunuch flung a handful of sewing needles to the wind, and propelled them with a crazed burst of magical energy—riddling Voldemort and Dolohov with the common woman’s tool turned magical weapon, wounding both.</p><p>The eldest Black sister joined her in a wild laugh, a mad rush of magical power straight into the soul, grounding her, giving them the power to fight on.</p><p>Bellatrix at Damawand. Even now, in the midst of the most terrible battle of her life, she was cackling with glee. They would remember her forever for this—but only if her side won. So she would have to win.</p><p>As Riddle pressed her on the attack, she decided that the time had come, through the roaring winds and the thrashing rain, to show her hand. It would do no good to wait until her allies were worn down or even dead, or until he had received his own reinforcements. At the moment, he had displayed new spells, some of them terrifying, and very vocalised, but no great or especial power, except for this storm which continued to lash them, slapping them with dust torn up from the ground, turned to mud to flick and sting them in the air. She, on the other hand, had already played her hand. He knew about her electric magic. She needed to press the advantage as hard as she could to have a chance to win outright, if it was even possible, and it probably wasn’t, but she needed to try.</p><p>“Tamar, I’m going for a kill!” She warned, and spun once more to face her former master. She whispered words of power in the oldest old Celtic tongues, and appealed now to Taranis.</p><p>Her wand left her hand, and centred in front of her heart, hovering in the air. It began to spin in circles. Speaking words in a voice that was now laced with power, and drenched in magic, booming unnaturally from her tiny form, with her wand spinning before her heart like a buzzsaw through the air, she reached out to the natural lightning of the air, the atmospherics of the enormous, magical storm that Riddle had called forth.</p><p>It was a case of magical Judo. She did not have the strength of Azi Dahaka behind her. But he had created the storm, pumped it with his own energy, for some nefarious purpose. Now, she took some of that energy, she bled it, she leached it from his creation, and adopted it for her own purpose.</p><p>Pulses of red lightning erupted out of the black clouds of the storm, in masses and masses. Bolt after bolt, too many bolts to count, searing eyeballs of those who looked at them, and lighting the horrible dark of the day of doom with their power. She converged a cluster of lightning, she chained ball lightning together and sent it hurling to the Earth, she directed bolt after bolt, she subtly altered their impulse to reach the ground as quickly as possible, she converged them onto the position from which Riddle and Dolohov stood and fought.</p><p>Even Voldemort, with all the power given to him by Azi Dahaka, was forced to crouch low to the ground, as the lightning bolts hammered his shields to the very bitter limit. Those new shields, like she had never seen before, spinning glyphs and glowing radiant tesseracts, held up to the barrage, but he was driven into the ground, forced to kneel before her power, to contract his shield as far as he could possibly could. Where a few minutes before he had the upper hand and had nearly ripped their souls out of their bodies, now she had driven him to ground.</p><p>The Brightest Witch of Her Age.</p><p>Elahaïs joined the assault, she brought down her own power, bolts of energy summoned by speaking words in the air, and the ground shaking under Voldemort’s feet. In the midst of it, Dolohov was completely undone. He had to turn his shields against a series of sharp attacks from Lady Tamar.</p><p>When he did, a single column of red lightning flashed down and touched his body, overcoming his shields. Dolohov had been her closest friend among the Death Eaters. They were the closest to intellectuals in their ranks. There were decades of memories there.</p><p>But in the end, time and fate and circumstance had trapped them in this moment, and with one word of power and the terrible red lightning from above, Bellatrix seared him away in a flash.</p><p>Perhaps it was the distraction of feeling that. Perhaps Riddle had just been mustering his power. But the seeming edge of victory disintegrated almost as soon as it seemed like it had come.</p><p>The ground erupted below her feet. She had to featherweight herself to avoid falling into a chasm. The spell she was using had been totally offensive; she had defended herself only through the fury of her blows. She had to recall her wand to her hand. The lightning stopped.</p><p>Voldemort rose from the ground, laughing, as a single imperious gesture of Koschei’s wand sent Elahaïs staggering back, too. “Did you think it would be so easy, Bella? It soon will be over! Your very soul will cease to exist. But I will not give you the pleasure of losing it <em>quickly. </em>I will not give you the pleasure of continuing to exist, in some fashion, as a Dementor yourself. No, I will keep your husk, for as long as it lives, as a living monument, a trophy to my victory.”</p><p>Voldemort’s troops, struggling through the intense violent of the combat around Nemrut Dagi, had finally reached the lakeshore, just south of their position. It would have been best for them, if they had been pinned by the Russians, for what happened next.</p><p>Tendrils of living smoke extended from Voldemort in all directions. Elahaïs, head bowed, reached out and halted these from reaching them, leaving Tamar and Bellatrix the opportunity to defend themselves from the physical manifestation of Voldemort’s power, as he lashed curse after curse at them even as he worked the more subtle and horrific magic of the servant of Azi Dahaka.</p><p>Bellatrix reached out and called to the storm again, but Voldemort had corrected his mistake, he held a firmer grip on the power in the air, he denied now her attempt to call upon it, while he constricted them within his power.</p><p>His own troops had no such protection against the black could. The tendrils snaked among them, and turned their triumph at reaching the lake into confusion and fear. They could not understand the tugging against them, they could not understand the feeling of confusion as the living black cloud engulfed them.</p><p>Suddenly, the entire regiment dropped down dead. Voldemort was uncaring of their loyalty to him, uncaring of whether they lived or died, even uncaring of their support in that moment. He simply needed them.</p><p>Just not as living men.</p><p>Now, he was fully given to Azi Dahaka, and now, he had the full, horrible power of his sacrifice at hand. The men dropped down silently dead, as if cords had been cut in their bodies, invisible cords, as their souls vanished without a whimper.</p><p>What rose up in place, from each and every one of them, was a Dementor.</p><p>Seeing the cloud rising, coming toward them from the south, Bellatrix was frozen for a moment in apoplectic horror. “Tamar, he has turned his own men into Dementors, to attack us!” She cried, forcing herself to conjure a shield just in time to protect them, as Tamar too looked south.</p><p>Tamar glanced to her. “Well, you know what to do!”</p><p>“I <em>can’t—</em>Death Eaters <em>can’t</em>!” Bellatrix screamed, with fear, real fear flashing in her eyes.</p><p>Voldemort heard that, and erupted in shrieking laughter. “Ahh, my dear Bella,” he batted away another attack from Elahaïs with a casual smirk, “you will know the Kiss of the Dementor.”</p><p>Tamar held herself cleanly and firmly in place, and conjured forth a tremendous roaring she-Lion of a Patronus, that drove back the massive horde. Her eyes were locked in concentration, but she was remarkably peaceful. “I will cover you, Bellatrix! Attack him! Give him all that you can!”</p><p>The Dementors recoiled from the two women, forced to fight shoulder-to-shoulder by necessity. They did not recognise Elahaïs as alive, and so the eunuch pressed the attack alone, hammering Voldemort with curse after curse by whatever strange power in the Room of Requirement could be called forth to the ghost’s purpose.</p><p>For a moment, Bellatrix thought that they could rally, and continue the fight, despite the Dementors. It filled her with a surge of hope, and her wand was singing in her hands, as she fought the greatest battle of all of her days.</p><p>And then fire erupted around them. Voldemort tore through them with a conjuration of Fiendfyre as no other. In the midst of it, he intentionally let it go, to tear at them wild and uncontrolled, as it burned the very soil at their feet. Around them, Dementors flashed through the Fiendfyre, pushing them to the very limit, hard-pressing Tamar’s Patronus.</p><p>And then a series of savage cutting hexes ripped through the fire. In the end, it was just all too much, as the Dementors loomed overhead.</p><p>Bella’s shields faltered. In a single moment, Lady Tamar Dadiani died, as she was torn to pieces by four savage cutting curses in short succession, flaying and separating the flash from her body, leaving her to topple dead.</p><p>The fire washed over Bellatrix and vanished. Voldemort was laughing. She managed to shield herself enough to survive, as the Fiendfyre dissipated, and able to see Elahaïs again, she looked desperately to her left. “Elahaïs, I need a PATRONUS!”</p><p>“Forgive me, Bellatrix—I am a ghost, <em>I cannot</em>!”</p><p>Suddenly the surge of a horde of Dementors descended upon her.</p><p>Bellatrix recoiled from them and fell back down to her knees, trying to gain herself a pathetic half-second longer of life. It only made Voldemort laugh harder.</p><p>
  <em>Patronus, Patronus… </em>
</p><p>She <em>knew </em> the spell. She had <em>practiced it, </em>once, in Hogwarts, a long time ago. She had only conjured a few bitter blue sparks, once. She had put no more effort into it; Bellatrix Black had long walked a dark road, and had little to be happy about. That one effort had been a memory of herself and Andromeda and Narcissa, all together, playing on a lake.</p><p>She doubted it would be the same, now.</p><p>Bellatrix thought—the happiest memory she had—sitting on a couch at Ancient House. Delphini in the middle. Hermione on the other side. Cuddling together, reading, kissing her wife-to-be in love, kissing her daughter’s cheek in affection. Simply being a family.</p><p>The determination to go back, and create more memories just like that one.</p><p>A glowing blue field erupted from her wand, to her own wonder and delight. It coalesced and formed into an impossible form, a Patronus, a <em>great </em> Patronus, a <em>Dragon </em>Patronus, a Patronus of a magical create, almost unheard of, sometimes thought impossible. The huge dragon of glowing blue light loomed over the battlefield, and even Voldemort seemed to recoil from its presence, as it drove the Dementors back in fear and terror, scattering them from the field.</p><p>No, Elahaïs was laughing. Voldemort didn’t <em>seem </em> to recoil. He <em>was </em>recoiling. He knew fear, and he knew shock, just like a mortal man still. Bellatrix pushed herself back to her feet as her Patronus loomed over the field.</p><p>“Tom Riddle, you may still beat me and kill me, after all the years you kept me as your slave. But you’ll do it with your own damned wand and hands, and not with a cloud of Dementors. Are you scared? Are you scared of that!? Come on, have at! I will die on my feet, you <em>bastard</em>! And you will have to do it yourself!” Her Patronus looming over her, Bellatrix once more went over onto the attack.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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